Does Training Improve Consistency of Roughness Judgments in a Matching Task

Shrivastav et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119(5), 3340 (2006)] reported a matching task in which a square wave modulated sawtooth wave (signal) was matched to a series of vowels (standards) to estimate the magnitude of roughness in voices. Results suggested that listeners found it difficult to isolate roughness from other voice quality dimensions such as breathiness. In the present experiment, a brief training session was added prior to the matching task to ensure that listeners were attending to variations in roughness alone. This training consisted of a rank‐ordering task in which listeners sorted the 34 test samples of the vowel /a/ in ascending order of roughness. For feedback, these rankings were compared to the rankings made by expert listeners. This criterion was used to ensure that all participants understood the dimension of voice quality under study. Listeners who met a specific eligibility criterion completed a modulation matching task to familiarize them with the matching task itself. Finally, thresholds for the roughness matching task were obtained and compared to thresholds obtained without training. The extent to which task‐related training can help listeners make perceptual judgments for specific dimensions of voice quality will be discussed.