Sorting through the impact of familiarity when processing vocal identity: Results from a voice sorting task

Stevenage, Sarah V.; Symons, Ashley E; Fletcher, A. C.; Coen, Chantelle

doi:10.1177/1747021819888064

Cited by 25 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…In keeping with previous studies on other aspects of voice perception (identity: Lavan, et al, 2016;Kreitewolf & Lavan, et al 2020;Lavan, Burston & Garrido, 2019;Lavan Burston, Merriman, et al, 2019;Stevenage, et al, 2020. Speech intelligibility: Domingo et al 2019Holmes et al, 2019;Holmes et al, 2018;Johnsrude et al, 2013;Kreitewolf et al, 2017), we found an overall familiarity advantage for age perception (see also Hunter & Fergusson, 2017) -note however, that familiarity interacted with identity (see below).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…Advantages due to being familiar with a voice have been widely reported for a number of perceptual judgements in the voice and speech processing literature. For example, voice identity perception is less error-prone when listeners are familiar with a voice (voice discrimination: Lavan, Scott & McGettigan, 2016;Kreitewolf, Lavan, Obleser & McGettigan, 2020; voice identity sorting: Lavan, Burston & Garrido, 2019;Lavan Burston, Merriman, Ladwa, Knight & McGettigan, 2019;Stevenage, Symons, Fletcher & Coen, 2020). Interestingly, judgements of a person's social traits (e.g., their perceived trustworthiness or dominance) are not systematically affected by voice familiarity (Lavan, Mileva & McGettigan, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The role of familiarity on within-person age judgements from voices

Lavan¹

2020

Preprint

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Listeners can perceive a person’s age from their voice with good accuracy. Studies have usually established this by asking listeners to directly estimate the age of unfamiliar voices. The recordings used mostly include cross-sectional samples of voices, including a people of different ages to cover the age range of interest. Such cross-sectional samples likely not only include cues to age in the sound of the voice but also socio-phonetic cues, encoded in how a person speaks. How accuracy is affected when minimising socio-phonetic cues by sampling the same voice at different timepoints remains largely unknown. Similarly, with the voices in age perception studies being usually unfamiliar to listeners, it is unclear how familiarity with a voice affects age perception. We asked listeners who were either familiar or unfamiliar with a set of voices to complete an age discrimination task: Listeners heard two recordings of the same person’s voice, recorded 15 years apart, and were asked to indicate in which recording the person was younger. Accuracy for both familiar and unfamiliar listeners was above chance. While familiarity advantages were apparent, accuracy was not particularly high: Familiar and unfamiliar listeners were correct for 68.2% and 62.7% of trials respectively (chance = 50%). Familiarity furthermore interacted with the voices included. Overall, our findings indicate that age perception from voices is not a trivial task at all times – even when listeners are familiar with a voice. We discuss our findings in light of how reliable voice may be as a signal for age.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of familiarity on within-person age judgements from voices

Lavan¹

2020

Preprint

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“…In contrast, unfamiliar listeners tend to systematically fail in "telling people together", thus perceiving variable voice recordings of the same person as many different people. This manifests in unfamiliar listeners making many more clusters than the true number of identities in the task (Lavan, Burston, & Garrido, 2019;, Stevenage, Symons, Fletcher & Coen, 2020. Similar evidence for familiarity advantages have also been reported for speaker discrimination tasks (Lavan, Scott & McGettigan, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 71%

Highly accurate and robust identity perception from personally familiar voices

Kanber,

Lavan,

McGettigan

2020

Preprint

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Previous research suggests that familiarity with a voice can afford benefits for voice and speech perception. However, even familiar voice perception has been reported to be error-prone in previous research, especially in the face of challenges such as reduced verbal cues and acoustic distortions. It has been hypothesised that such findings may arise due to listeners not being “familiar enough” with the voices used in laboratory studies, and thus being inexperienced with their full vocal repertoire. By extension, voice perception based on highly familiar voices – acquired via substantial, naturalistic experience – should therefore be more robust than voice perception from less familiar voices. We investigated this proposal by contrasting voice perception of personally-familiar voices (participants’ romantic partners) versus lab-trained voices in challenging experimental tasks. Specifically, we tested how differences in familiarity may affect voice identity perception from non-verbal vocalisations and acoustically-modulated speech. Large benefits for the personally-familiar voice over less familiar, lab-trained voice were found for identity recognition, with listeners displaying both highly accurate yet more conservative recognition of personally familiar voices. However, no familiar-voice benefits were found for speech comprehension against background noise. Our findings suggest that listeners have fine-tuned representations of highly familiar voices that result in more robust and accurate voice recognition despite challenging listening contexts, yet these advantages may not always extend to speech perception. Our study therefore highlights that familiarity is indeed a continuum, with identity perception for personally-familiar voices being highly accurate.

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“…For example, as in previous sorting studies, participants did not make many errors for telling people apart, leading to near-perfect performance in these measures. Future research may attempt to increase the difficulty of "telling people apart" by, for example, using less variable stimuli that sound less distinct from each other, both across and possibly also in within person (e.g., Stevenage et al, 2020). However, we note that changes to the stimuli will not only affect how well participants can tell people apart but will also affect "telling people together" (e.g., making this aspect of the task easier through decreased variability).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent studies investigating the effects of within-person variability on voice and face perception have highlighted further similarities between voice and face identity processing (For voices: Lavan, Burston, & Garrido, 2019 ; Lavan, Burston, Ladwa, et al, 2019 ; Lavan, Merriman, et al, 2019 ; Stevenage et al, 2020 , For faces: Andrews et al, 2015 ; Balas & Saville, 2017 ; Jenkins et al, 2011 ; Laurence et al, 2016 ; Redfern & Benton, 2017 ; Short et al, 2017 ; Zhou & Mondloch, 2016 ). Images of faces and recordings of voices can vary considerably from instance to instance ( Burton, 2013 ; Lavan, Burton, et al, 2019 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing unfamiliar voice and face identity perception using identity sorting tasks

Johnson

McGettigan

Lavan

2020

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Identity sorting tasks, in which participants sort multiple naturally varying stimuli of usually two identities into perceived identities, have recently gained popularity in voice and face processing research. In both modalities, participants who are unfamiliar with the identities tend to perceive multiple stimuli of the same identity as different people and thus fail to “tell people together.” These similarities across modalities suggest that modality-general mechanisms may underpin sorting behaviour. In this study, participants completed a voice sorting and a face sorting task. Taking an individual differences approach, we asked whether participants’ performance on voice and face sorting of unfamiliar identities is correlated. Participants additionally completed a voice discrimination (Bangor Voice Matching Test) and a face discrimination task (Glasgow Face Matching Test). Using these tasks, we tested whether performance on sorting related to explicit identity discrimination. Performance on voice sorting and face sorting tasks was correlated, suggesting that common modality-general processes underpin these tasks. However, no significant correlations were found between sorting and discrimination performance, with the exception of significant relationships for performance on “same identity” trials with “telling people together” for voices and faces. Overall, any reported relationships were however relatively weak, suggesting the presence of additional modality-specific and task-specific processes.

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Sorting through the impact of familiarity when processing vocal identity: Results from a voice sorting task

Cited by 25 publications

References 69 publications

The role of familiarity on within-person age judgements from voices

The role of familiarity on within-person age judgements from voices

Highly accurate and robust identity perception from personally familiar voices

Comparing unfamiliar voice and face identity perception using identity sorting tasks

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