Dubbing in animated films: challenges and the impact of voice design

Abstract

Listeners rely on speech vocal cues to judge speakers' age, size, personality, and other paralinguistic and extralinguistic features. In this paper, we focus on two perception experiments investigating how characters' voices in animated films provide indexical information about their individuality to listeners. In the first experiment, we examined how listeners perceived physical, psychological, and social features from voice characteristics. The stimuli consisted of speech utterances by five animated film characters. The second experiment aimed to investigate the potential influence of lexical content on the evaluation of speaker characteristics. This experiment was identical to the first experiment, except the stimuli were transcriptions of the utterances used in the first experiment. Our hypothesis was that the results from the listening test and the reading test would not be congruent, but they turned out to be the exact opposite. This finding is intriguing and claims for further research.