On the perception of similarity among talkers

Abstract

A listener who recognizes a talker notices characteristic attributes of the talker's speech despite the novelty of each utterance. Accounts of talker perception have often presumed that consistent aspects of an individual's speech, termed indexical properties, are ascribable to a talker's unique anatomy or consistent vocal posture distinct from acoustic correlates of phonetic contrasts. Accordingly, the perception of a talker is acknowledged to occur independently of the perception of a linguistic message. Alternatively, some studies suggest that attention to attributes of a talker includes indexical linguistic attributes conveyed in the articulation of consonants and vowels. This investigation sought direct evidence of attention to phonetic attributes of speech in perceiving talkers. Natural samples and sinewave replicas derived from them were used in three experiments assessing the perceptual properties of natural and sine-wave sentences; of temporally veridical and reversed natural and sine-wave sentences; and of an acoustic correlate of vocal tract scale to judgments of sine-wave talker similarity. The results revealed that the subjective similarity of individual talkers is preserved in the absence of natural vocal quality; and that local phonetic segmental attributes as well as global characteristics of speech can be exploited when listeners notice characteristics of talkers.

Neural Processing of What and Who Information in Speech

“…Our findings are consistent the emerging view that speaker information processing is carried out by a network of regions that include the right anterior STG among others (von Kriegstein, Smith, Patterson, Kiebel, & Griffiths, 2010;Dehaene-Lambertz et al, 2006). This network may convey information about the speaker beyond voice pitch (which is processed preferentially in the right anterior STG (Belin, 2006;Belin, Fecteau, & Bedard, 2004;Belin & Zatorre, 2003;Belin et al, 2000) and may reflect other details specific to the speaker including vocal tract size (von Kriegstein et al, 2010;von Kriegstein, Smith, Patterson, Ives, & Griffiths, 2007) and articulatory habits (Remez, Fellowes, & Nagel, 2007).…”

Tailoring auditory training to patient needs with single and multiple talkers: Transfer-appropriate gains on a four-choice discrimination test

“…Listeners may gradually acquire information about the properties of a talker’s productions based on accurate encoding and perception of linguistic content and use this information to map highly variable acoustic productions onto individual representations (Nygaard & Pisoni, 1998, Remez et al, 2007, Remez et al, 1997, Sheffert et al, 2002). In addition, the findings from these studies demonstrate that prior exposure to a given talker’s voice substantially improves subsequent speech recognition for items spoken by that talker compared to an unfamiliar talker.…”

Talker Identification Across Source Mechanisms: Experiments With Laryngeal and Electrolarynx Speech

“…Listeners can also be trained to recognize unfamiliar talkers from only their format-based vocal structure and speech dynamics (Sheffert et al, 2002). Moreover, listeners' subjective impressions of similar-sounding talkers are preserved across the presence or absence of vocal source information (Remez, Fellowes, & Nagel, 2007). Instead, this result may suggest that the acoustic-phonetic features to talker identity related to the vocal filter may not be learned independently and (at least initially) cannot be differentiated from the vocal source during talker identification, even when the properties of that source are homogeneous across different talkers.…”