Sexe-Invloeden Bij De Beoordeling Van Stem En Uitspraak

In an attempt to develop a standardized instrument to measure subjective voice and pronunciation quality a sample op 35 bipolar seven-point scales was selected and tested for reliability among raters by a preliminary pencil-and-paper investigation.Different groups of subjects were asked to rate the ideal male voice, the ideal female voice, and their own voice on each of the 35 items. The contribution of different subject factors to the variance in the ratings of each concept on each scale separately was established. One of those factors was sex of the rater.For practical reasons, we want this nascent instrument to be equally applicable for male and female speakers. We therefore studied the differences between mean ratings for ideal male speaker and ideal female speaker on each of the scales as well.The results show (1) many significant differences between perceived ideal male and ideal female voice, which qualitatively are rather inde-pendent of the sex of the informant; quantitatively female raters show a tendency to make smaller differences between male and female ideal speaker on the rating scales; (2) male and female raters often differ significantly in their judgment of ideal male voice alone or of ideal female voice alone; where this is the case, the mean judgment of the female raters practically always stands on a more 'extreme' point of the rating scale; (3) male and female raters often differ significantly in the ratings of their own voice; in general, the differences between own voice ratings by males and females on the 35 rating scales are qualitatively the same as those between ratings of male and female ideal voice respectively.These results were compared with Kramer's (1977) study on perceptions of (typical) male and female speech. It is concluded that the same stereo-types play a part in our subject's ideal and self ratings as in the 'typical speech' ratings of Kramer's subjects.