Effects of acoustic parameter on students’ perception of teachers’ traits: A perceptual analysis

Human speech has been proven to carry more information than people expected. It is suggested that listeners are able to extract the personal information including gender, age and even personality of the speaker who uttered the voice (Pisanski et al., 2014). Regarding the acoustic parameters which would significantly influence the perception of traits, former research argued that pitch, intonation and formant dispersion might affect the listener’s judgement on speaker’s personality (Hughes et al., 2009; Tyler, 2015; Klofstad et al., 2012). Such perception of personality might further influence the listeners following behaviour in various situation, yet it remains unclear that how the listeners’ perception of the produced voice with different vocal parameters will influence the listener’s judgement on speaker’s personality in an education setting. Therefore, a psychological experiment was conducted to investigate the student’s and adult’s pattern of perception regarding the linkage between the acoustic parameters and the personality of artificial speaker given the context that the voice is uttered by a secondary school teacher. Results show that the students possibly tend to prefer the voice with higher fundamental frequency and higher formant dispersion, and significantly regard the voice with wider pitch range (p = 0.016) as produced by a better teacher. The adults and students show mere statistical difference regarding the perception of teacher’s voice. Based on the preference for acoustic parameters, it is indicated that students tend to consider the teacher who sounds more trustworthy and less dominant as a better teacher.