Listener Experience and Perception of Voice Quality

TLDR

The study used 5 speech‑language clinicians and 5 naive listeners to rate similarity of normal and dysphonic voice pairs, applying multidimensional scaling to identify perceptually salient voice characteristics and comparing solution spaces to assess the influence of clinical experience. Naive listeners employed consistent perceptual strategies, whereas clinicians varied substantially in the voice parameters they deemed important, indicating that averaging clinician data can mask individual perceptual differences.

Abstract

Five speech-language clinicians and 5 naive listeners rated the similarity of pairs of normal and dysphonic voices. Multidimensional scaling was used to determine the voice characteristics that were perceptually important for each voice set and listener group. Solution spaces were compared to determine if clinical experience affects perceptual strategies. Naive and expert listeners attended to different aspects of voice quality when judging the similarity of voices, for both normal and pathological voices. All naive listeners used similar perceptual strategies; however, individual clinicians differed substantially in the parameters they considered important when judging similarity. These differences were large enough to suggest that care must be taken when using data averaged across clinicians, because averaging obscures important aspects of an individual’s perceptual behavior.