Experimental Studies in Vocal Expression

Abstract

Vocal expression can be measured by only one standard, viz, its effect upon listeners. The subjects were 210 young men from ten different sections of the course in "The Elements of Public Speaking" at the University of Wisconsin. The material was Austin Dobson's poem "Tu Quoque." As each subject read the assigned selection he was judged by every other student in his group, being given a percentage grade on vocal expressiveness. An attempt to select a battery of tests which should show significant correlations with the criterion was made. For general intelligence Terman's revision of the Binet-Simon word list was used, for audition Seashore's group measures of musical talent were used, thus making possible group measurements of pitch, sense of intensity, sense of time sense of consonance, and tonal memory. The battery of aptitude tests correlates to the extent of +.52 with the criterion. From Psych Bulletin 22:03:00345. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)