Impact of salient vocal qualities on causal attribution for a speaker's behavior

Abstract

Two determinants of auditory salience were manipulated--the intensity and sex of a speaker's voice. 98 college students served as listeners. As predicted, Ss attended more to a 75-db than to a 70-db voice on a binaural listening test, and Ss attributed more causality to an actor in a 2-person conversation when his voice was 75 db in intensity than when it was 70 db. Contrary to expectation, Ss listened more to the actor with the male voice. Consistent with this tendency for the male voice to be more salient, Ss attributed more causality to an actor when the voice was male than when it had been electronically converted to a female voice of the same intensity and intonation. Vocal salience also influenced Ss' impressions of the actors, but it had no impact on recall of the actors' verbalizations. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved). © 1982 American Psychological Association.