Audiobook enjoyment is enhanced by narrator pleasantness and familiarity

Audiobooks offer an increasingly popular and accessible medium for engaging with book language. Here, we asked whether greater enjoyment of an audiobook is associated with better comprehension and motivation toward narratives, and whether aspects of the narrator’s voice can modulate the experience and outcomes of audiobook listening. In Experiment 1, participants heard audiobook excerpts produced by a highly-naturalistic synthesised voice.After each excerpt, participants rated their listening enjoyment, answered a multiple-choice content comprehension question, and finally chose whether to wait to hear more of the narrative (or skip to the next one). We found that greater enjoyment was associated with increased probability of correct comprehension and waiting. Building on previous findings for book reading, we therefore show that the enhancing effects of moment-to-moment fluctuations in book enjoyment generalise across written and spoken modalities. In Experiment 2, participants heard the same audiobook excerpts, now narrated by 2 different synthesised voices that significantly differed in perceived pleasantness. Here, we demonstrated higher ratings of enjoyment for excerpts read by the more pleasant-sounding voice. In Experiment 3, we harnessed personalised voice cloning to further show that audiobook enjoyment was greater when listening to personally-familiar narrators (self, friend), compared with unfamiliar narrators. Our findings offer new evidence for the rewarding role of voice identity perception in spoken language perception, and present interesting implications for how personalised narrators could improve engagement with spoken book language.