Social cues in multimedia learning: Role of speaker's voice

In 2 experiments, learners who were seated at a computer workstation received a narrated animation about lightning formation. Then, they took a retention test, took a transfer test, and rated the speaker. There was a voice effect, in which students performed better on the transfer test and rated the speaker more positively if the voice in the narration had a standard accent rather than a foreign accent (Experiment 1) and if the voice was human rather than machine synthesized (Experiment 2). The retention test results were mixed. The results are consistent with social agency theory, which posits that social cues in multimedia messages can encourage learners to interpret human-computer interactions as more similar to human-to-human conversation.