Listener judgements of speaker pitch and rate of articulation: a forensic perspective

When entering the legal system, people bring with them prejudices that they hold about voices. The experiments in this paper focus on perceptions of pitch and articulation rate (AR). We ran two voice rating tasks where listeners judged voices on ten traits and behaviours. Three different 15s samples were taken for three voices and manipulated so that we had ‘high’, ‘average’ and ‘low’ samples of pitch (Experiment 1) and AR (Experiment 2) for each accent (3 x 3 samples). 180 participants in each experiment were asked to listen to each of the nine voices, rating them using a 7-point Likert scale in relation to ten social traits and ten morally good, bad and ambiguous behaviours, including criminal offences. Results reveal that pitch and AR are subject to different listener perceptions which can have serious implications in forensic contexts. Our previous results regarding accents and stereotypes were also largely replicated.