A perceptual and acoustic study of dubbed voices in an animated film

Abstract

Listeners rely on speech vocal cues to judge speakers’ age, size, personality, and other paralinguistic and extralinguistic features. These judgements are often based on vocal stereotypes which may be universally or culturally determined. This study examines how physical, psychological, social, and vocal features are perceived by listeners and which acoustic features may influence their judgements. An experiment integrating a perceptual test and acoustic measurements was performed. The corpus consisted of speech utterances produced by five animated film characters, dubbed in Brazilian Portuguese. The stimuli were judged by 77 Brazilian Portuguese native speakers, 46 women and 31 men, aged 20 to 50. The acoustic analysis was performed automatically. Acoustic measures included mean f 0 , f 0 baseline, spectral emphasis and H1-H2. For interrater agreement analysis, Cronbach's Alpha was chosen. The results indicated close agreements among judges for all characters. Overall scores obtained for all characters were above .90. In interpreting the results, the influence sound symbolism codes may have on listeners’ judgments and the factors influencing vocal stereotypes have been considered. The discussion of the acoustic and perceptual analysis results takes into consideration if voice actors adapt their voices to fit the characters or otherwise are cast because of their natural voice characteristics.