Attractiveness of French voices for German listeners - results from native and non-native read speech

This study investigated how the perceived attractiveness of voices was influenced by a foreign language, a foreign accent, and the level of fluency in the foreign language. Stimuli were taken from a French-German corpus of read speech with German native speakers as raters. Additional factors were stimulus length (syllable or entire sentence) and sex (of the raters and speakers). Results with German native raters reveal that stimuli spanning just a syllable were judged significantly less attractive than those containing a sentence, and that stimuli from French speakers were assessed as more attractive than those of German speakers. This backs the cliche that French has an attractive image for German listeners. An analysis of the best vs. the worst rated sentences suggest that an individual mix of voice quality, disfluency management, prosodic behaviour and pronunciation precision is responsible for the results.