Influence of voice prosody on preferential behaviors
直樹 蓮井, Yugo Takeuchi · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2006
In mother-infant interactions, the mother talks in a special voice that is characterized by elevated fundamental frequency (pitch) and exaggerated intonation contours, and the infant turns a face toward the voice and smiles naturally. This case suggests that humans react automatically to the special prosody without understanding of the lexical meaning in the word. We propose a hypothesis that adults react automatically as in the case of the infant by not only a difference of prosody but also the situation that one is in. This study aims to figure out the function of prosody on voice cognition and utilize these findings for constructing the voice user interface systems with a low cognitive load for users. In this paper, using the virtual maze on a display, we gave the participants a task that they should escape as quickly as possible from the maze. In the situation where the participants choose the route on T-shaped intersection, we gave the participants two leading voices of different prosody, and observed the preferential behavior for the two voices. The experimental results indicate that the voice of the voice user interface systems synthesizing the high pitch or the high rate of speech is naturally accepted and can direct the users.