Voice Principle
Overview
“People learn better when narration is spoken in a human voice rather than in a machine voice.(Mayer, 2014)”
Similar to the Personalization Principle that a speaker with a conversational style will have more impact on learning than a formal style presentation, the Voice Principle states that learners learn more deeply when being spoken to in a friendly natural human voice than a synthetic computer-generated voices voice. A machine(synthetic computer-generated) voice also means not speaking as if you are a machine, just like how the teacher does in the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” which made the lesson boring and tedious and lead to a negative effect on the learning. ‘A friendly human voice’ is emotional, it conveys that someone is speaking directly to you and give you a sense of belonging and social presence.
*The Voice Principle is one of the multimedia principles that assist designers in the planning of instructional multimedia materials to actively engage learners in learning. It is suggested to foster generative processing in the cognitive theory of multimedia learning(CTML).
Evidence
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It is widely claimed that the use of synthetic voice in educational contexts and materials impedes comprehension and increases the cognitive load of the learners.
To explore this claim, Mayer(2020) conducted five experiments on different studies in which there were comparisons between machine voice and human voice(Atkinson et al., 2005; Mayer et al., 2003; Mayer & DaPra, 2012). The results indicate that the natural human voice is much better than the synthetic voice, as it is natural and socially appealing t people. Furthermore, the experiments show that the human voice positively affects retention and transfer scores. Giving an example of showing students a 140-second narrated video of lightning formation that included spoken words(Mayer, 2003), a non-conversational Russian accent speaker and a standard accent voice speaker are provided to the learners. Students exposed to the standard voice type scored higher than the other type in the following transfer test. This leads to the conclusion that a destructive and unappealing human voice may harm people because it reduces the learner's social stimuli.
More research and experiments that support the Voice Principle are stated in Table 1.
Two Theoretical Perspectives
Cognitive Load Theory
- Cognitive Load Theory: a cognitive architecture of a human being is divided into three parts: a limited working memory, a limitless long-term memory, and schemas that work to organize in long-term memory (Sweller, 2011)
According to cognitive load researchers (Paas & Sweller, 2014), synthetic voices increase extraneous cognitive load and reduce usable cognitive capacity to integrate new information with existing knowledge. An unappealing voice may cause learners more time to generate the information which is more likely to increase the working memory that is distributed into the cognitive thinking process that raises the cognitive load.
According to cognitive load theory assumptions, the human brain receives instruction in two different channels, verbal and visual, before information processing begins, and the capacity is relatively limited. As a result, synthetic machine-generated voice types may increase the extraneous cognitive load of those exposed to multimedia instruction or engaged in multimedia material because it appeals to the uninterested and distracting in the absence of sufficient social cues (Wouters et al., 2008).
Social Agency
Learning involves social activity(Bandura, 1969). According to social agency theorists (Atkinson et al., 2005), the human voice can be identified quickly due to social interaction and familiarity, and this results in active learning.
Reference
“Anyone, anyone” teacher from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. (2011, December 29). Retrieved November 18, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhiCFdWeQfA.
Mayer, R. (2014). The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, Second Edition. New York City: Cambridge University Press.
Swller, J., (1994). Cognitive load theory, learning difficulty, and instructional design. Learning and Instrction. 4: 295-312