Effects of a Speaker’s Voice Quality on Listening Effort and Working Memory Functions (vor Ort)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
University teachers are professional voice users who rely on their voice to convey knowledge to their students in seminars and lectures. With an estimated prevalence of over 20%, university teachers also face a significantly higher risk for developing voice disorders than the general population. To date, it is still unclear how listening to dysphonic speech, which is characterized by hoarseness, might affect students’ spoken language processing and related cognitive functions. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of a speaker’s voice quality on listening effort and memory for heard information in adult listeners, under lecture hall typical acoustic conditions. In a laboratory experiment, listeners perform a series of tasks that assess heard text recall, auditory verbal serial recall, listening effort, and speech intelligibility. Tasks are presented in a within-subject design according to two voice conditions - a normal voice versus an impaired voice quality – both auralized within a computer-modeled lecture hall. Beyond performance measures, subjective evaluations of the two voice qualities are collected and analyzed. The preliminary results of the work presented here may promote our understanding of the effect of lecturers’ voice quality on students’ learning outcome in university contexts.
