Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The human voice conveys more than just words; acoustic-vocal cues like pitch range and formant dispersion can shape perceptions of a speaker's personality. While research has explored this in various contexts, the impact of vocal cues on perceptions of teachers' traits remains unclear, particularly considering the educational level of listeners. This study investigates how college and secondary students perceive teacher utterances with manipulated acoustic parameters. Results showed that students from both age groups considered voices with a wider pitch range as being uttered by good teachers, but only the secondary students perceived a higher F0 and a wider formant dispersion as a feature of being a good teacher. Those suggest the mappings between teachers' characteristics and acoustic features might be different by age or education level, which could potentially the future teacher training for different levels of education.