Identification and discrimination of bilingual talkers across languages

Abstract

This study investigated the extent to which language familiarity affects the perception of the indexical properties of speech by testing listeners' identification and discrimination of bilingual talkers across two different languages. In one experiment, listeners were trained to identify bilingual talkers speaking in only one language and were then tested on their ability to identify the same talkers speaking in another language. In the second experiment, listeners discriminated between bilingual talkers across languages in an AX discrimination paradigm. The results of these experiments indicate that there is sufficient language-independent indexical information in speech for listeners to generalize knowledge of talkers' voices across languages and to successfully discriminate between bilingual talkers regardless of the language they are speaking. However, the results of these studies also revealed that listeners do not solely rely on language-independent information when performing these tasks. Listeners use language-dependent indexical cues to identify talkers who are speaking a familiar language. Moreover, the tendency to perceive two talkers as the "same" or "different" depends on whether the talkers are speaking in the same language. The combined results of these experiments thus suggest that indexical processing relies on both language-dependent and language-independent information in the speech signal.

Gradient language dominance affects talker learning

“…First, there was an overall effect of native language: native listeners performed better than secondlanguage listeners (Korean-English bilinguals hearing English voices) or listeners unfamiliar with the language (English listeners hearing Korean voices). While previous studies showed that listeners learn to recognize unfamiliar voices better when they speak the language or dialect of the talker (Goggin et al, 1991;Perrachione et al, 2011;Winters et al, 2008), we demonstrate that listeners with lengthy exposure, but without native-speaker status, had increased difficulty recognizing voices in their second language. Our second major discovery was that within bilinguals, age of second-language acquisition impacted performance on voice learning.…”

“…Recent studies suggest a relationship between knowing a language and ability to identify talkers in that language (Goggin et al, 1991;Johnson et al, 2011;Perrachione et al, 2011;Sullivan and Schlichting, 2000;Winters et al, 2008). This radically departs from a viewpoint that speech processing operates over an abstract set of symbols.…”

“…Perrachione et al (2011) found that individual dyslexic listeners' degree of impairment in phonological processing predicts their ability to recognize voices in their native language. Goggin et al (1991) demonstrated that monolingual English speakers identified English-German bilinguals' voices better when those individuals spoke English than when they spoke German (see also Winters et al, 2008). On the other hand, Goggin et al observed no significant difference in voice recognition abilities for English-Spanish bilinguals who were tested on Englishvs.…”

The impact of musical training and tone language experience on talker identification

“…In this study, accuracy ranged from 52% to 85% across all 65 normal-hearing individual listeners. Substantial individual variability is also observed in other studies investigating voice recognition (e.g., Winters et al, 2008). Such individual differences pose a special problem for voice lineups in forensic cases: Evidently, earwitnesses vary tremendously in their competency to identify speakers in voice parades.…”

“…Namely, listeners have more difficulty identifying talkers in unfamiliar languages compared to their native language, a phenomenon known as the language familiarity effect (Perrachione et al, 2011;Perrachione et al, 2009). This advantage is assumed to arise because native speakers can access talker-idiosyncratic phonetic variation in their native language (e.g., Remez et al, 1997;Winters et al, 2008). For this reason, we compared native-Mandarin versus native-English listeners' performance in identifying Mandarin, English, and Spanish talkers.…”