When human listeners try to guess the spatial position of a speech source, they are influenced by the speaker's production level, regardless of the intensity level reaching their ears. Because the perception of distance is a very difficult task, they rely on their own experience, which tells them that a whispering talker is close to them, and that a shouting talker is far away. This study aims to test if similar results could be obtained for prosodic variations produced by a human speaker in an everyday life environment. It consists in a localization task, during which blindfolded subjects had to estimate the incoming voice direction, speaker orientation and distance of a trained female speaker, who uttered single words, following instructions concerning intensity and social-affect to be performed. This protocol was implemented in two experiments. First, a complex pretext task was used in order to distract the subjects from the strange behavior of the speaker. On the contrary, during the second experiment, the subjects were fully aware of the prosodic variations, which allowed them to adapt their perception. Results show the importance of the pretext task, and suggest that the perception of the speaker's orientation can be influenced by voice intensity.

翻译：当人类听者试图猜测语音源的空间位置时，他们会受到说话者发声强度的影响，而不管到达他们耳朵的声级如何。由于距离感知是一项非常困难的任务，他们依赖自身的经验，这些经验告诉他们，低语的说话者离他们很近，而喊叫的说话者则离得很远。本研究旨在测试在日常生活环境中，由真人说话者产生的韵律变化是否也能获得类似结果。研究包括一个定位任务，在此任务中，蒙眼的受试者需要估计一位受过训练的女性说话者发出的单个词语的传入声音方向、说话者朝向和距离，该说话者按照关于强度和社交情感的指令进行发声。该方案通过两个实验实施。首先，使用一个复杂的借口任务来分散受试者对说话者奇怪行为的注意力。相反，在第二个实验中，受试者完全了解韵律变化，这使他们能够调整自己的感知。结果显示了借口任务的重要性，并表明说话者朝向的感知可能受到声音强度的影响。