To achieve pedagogic goals and deal with environmental constraints such as noise when lecturing, teachers adapt their speech production in terms of frequency, intensity, and temporal aspects. The mastery of appropriate vocal skills is key to teachers’ speech intelligibility, health, and educational effectiveness. This project tests the relevance of virtual reality (VR) for training teachers’ vocal skills by simulating a lesson in a realistic VR environment characterized by adjustable constraints such as background noise and fidgety children. The VR environment depicts an elementary school classroom with 16 pupils aged 9 to 12 years old animated with typical childlike actions. To validate this virtual classroom in terms of speech characteristics, we conducted acoustic analyses on the speech productions of 30 female teachers in three conditions: (1) giving a free speech while facing the experimenter (control), (2) teaching in their usual classroom (in vivo), and (3) teaching the same lesson in a virtual classroom (in virtuo). The background noise in the VR setting was adjusted for each talker so it was similar to the level measured in vivo. Repeated measures ANOVAs showed that teachers significantly increased their voice frequency, intensity, and intonation and made longer pauses while speaking in vivo and in virtuo, compared to the control condition (p < .001). These voice and speech adaptations (partly related to background noise), the strong feeling of presence, and the lack of side effects suggest that the virtual classroom may facilitate voice training and rehabilitation for teachers.

为了实现教学目标并在演讲时处理诸如噪音之类的环境限制，教师会根据频率，强度和时间方面调整其语音输出。掌握适当的语音技能是教师语音清晰度，健康和教育效果的关键。该项目通过在具有可调节约束（例如背景噪音和烦躁不安的孩子）为特征的现实VR环境中模拟课程，测试了虚拟现实（VR）与培训教师语音技能的相关性。虚拟现实环境描绘了一个小学教室，其中有16名9至12岁的学生以典型的童趣动作进行了动画制作。为了验证该虚拟教室的语音特性，我们在以下三种情况下对30位女教师的语音产生进行了声学分析：（1）在面对实验者（对照）时发表言论，（2）在他们平时的教室里（体内）授课，以及（3）在虚拟教室里的同一课上（virtuo）授课。为每个讲话者调整了VR设置中的背景噪音，使其类似于体内测量的水平。重复测量的方差分析表明，与对照组相比，在体内和体外说话时，教师的语音频率，强度和语调明显提高，停顿时间更长（p  <.001）。这些语音和语音适应（部分与背景噪音有关），强烈的临场感和无副作用表明虚拟教室可以促进教师的语音培训和康复。