Abstract

The voice effect or principle assumes that people learn better when they are exposed to multimedia instruction that includes a human voice rather than a machine voice. This investigation reconsiders the voice principle by investigating the relationship between learning outcomes and mental effort of the learners. Text-to-speech (TTS) engines have improved dramatically since the early 2000s, thanks to technological advancements. The researchers employed sophisticated TTS engines in a pretest-posttest design to analyze the various voice types (human voice, traditional machine voice, and modern machine voice). The results indicated that the progress in TTS technology enabled to generate real-life-like voices, and therefore no significant difference was observed between the modern and human voice. Furthermore, the participants’ cognitive load was consistent with the findings of the learning outcomes.

Keywords

References

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