Abstract
Hashimoto (2016) found that impression formation is changed by fine changes in mean utterance pitch. However, Hashimoto (2016) did not investigate the effect of fine changes in utterance speed and listener's sex. The present study examined the influence of fine changes in utterance speed and listener's sex on impression formation. Participants were 21 undergraduate and graduate students (11 females, 10 males). The voice stimuli were made by first having one male and one female speaker read a first-time self-introduction, and then manipulating the utterance speed in 19 steps, with an 8% change between each step. Results indicated that the faster the utterance speed was, the higher the perceived utterance pitch was. Also, female listeners judged the speaker's age to be higher than male listeners. These results suggest that utterance speed and listener's sex are related to physical characteristics of a voice or impressions of a speaker's attributes.
