A paper published by Cristina Baus and Albert Costa, UPF researchers at the Center for Cognition and Brain (CBC), in collaboration with researchers from the Université Aix-Marseille and the University of Glasgow, has shown that listeners across languages form very rapid personality impressions from the voice and this is not modulated by the language of the listener, native or foreign.
In a large-scale study, Spanish listeners were asked to judge personality traits (trustworthiness, dominance, competence) just by hearing the voice of Spanish speakers producing the word “Hola” (native language) or Scottish speakers producing the word “Hello” (foreign language). Our work revealed four important results:
4. Listeners across languages do not pay attention to the same voice properties (e.g., pitch) when evaluating personality traits. In contrast to previous results relating low-pitch voices with dominance especially for males, Spanish listeners considered high-pitch voices as more dominant than low-pitch ones. In sum, the study reveals that social voice perception contains certain elements invariant across languages/cultures, while others are modulated by the cultural/linguistic background of the listeners.
Related work:
Cristina Baus, Phil McAleer, Katherine Marcoux, Pascal Belin, Albert Costa (2019), "Forming social impressions from voices in native and foreign languages", Scientific Reports, 9: 414.