Impacts of voice pleasantness and familiarity on enjoyment and engagement with spoken narratives

Recent experimental reading research has found that situational enjoyment of texts plays an important role in predicting both comprehension and motivation to continue reading. Here, we used narrative listening to test whether these findings generalise to spoken narratives, and to further investigate how different aspects of the narrator’s voice affect the experience and outcomes of listening. In Experiment 1, participants heard spoken book excerpts produced by a highly-naturalistic synthesised voice. After each excerpt, participants rated their enjoyment of the excerpt, answered a multiple-choice content comprehension question, and finally chose whether to wait to hear more of the narrative (or skip to the next one; a measure of motivation). Replicating the findings from reading research, we found that greater enjoyment was associated with increased probability of both correct comprehension and waiting. In Experiment 2, participants heard the same book excerpts, now narrated by 2 different synthesised voices that significantly differed in perceived pleasantness. Here, we found higher enjoyment for excerpts read by the more pleasant-sounding voice, but no effects of pleasantness on comprehension or waiting. In Experiment 3, we harnessed personalised voice cloning to show that both enjoyment and waiting were increased when listening to personally-familiar narrators (self, friend), compared with unfamiliar narrators. Our findings offer mechanistic evidence for the rewarding role of voice identity perception in spoken language processing, and present interesting implications for how personalised narrators could improve engagement with spoken book language.