Cultural and language differences in voice quality perception: a preliminary investigation using synthesized signals.
BACKGROUND
Perceptual voice evaluation is a common clinical tool. However, to date, there is no consensus yet as to which common quality should be measured. Some available evidence shows that voice quality is a language-specific property which may be different across different languages. The familiarity of a language may affect the perception and reliability in rating voice quality.


OBJECTIVE
The present study set out to investigate the effects of listeners' cultural and language backgrounds on the perception of voice qualities.


METHODS
Forty speech pathology students from Australia and Hong Kong were asked to rate the breathy and rough qualities of synthesized voice signals in Cantonese and English.


RESULTS
Results showed that the English stimulus sets as a whole were rated less severely than the Cantonese stimuli by both groups of listeners. In addition, the male Cantonese and English breathy stimuli were rated differently by the Australian and Hong Kong listeners.


CONCLUSIONS
These results provided some evidence to support the claim that cultural and language backgrounds of the listeners would affect the perception for some voice quality types. Thus, the cultural and language backgrounds of judges should be taken into consideration in clinical voice evaluation.
Yiu
Edwin M-L
EM
Voice Research Laboratory, Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR, China. eyiu@hku.hk
Murdoch
Bruce
B
Hird
Kathryn
K
Lau
Polly
P
Ho
Elaine Mandy
EM
D000328:Adult; D003469:Culture; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D015588:Observer Variation; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013067:Speech Perception; D014832:Voice Disorders / Q000453:epidemiology; D014833:Voice Quality