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

Abstract

Listeners can use pitch changes in speech to identify talkers. Individuals exhibit large variability in sensitivity to pitch and in accuracy perceiving talker identity. In particular, people who have musical training or long-term tone language use are found to have enhanced pitch perception. In the present study, the influence of pitch experience on talker identification was investigated as listeners identified talkers in native language as well as non-native languages. Experiment 1 was designed to explore the influence of pitch experience on talker identification in two groups of individuals with potential advantages for pitch processing: musicians and tone language speakers. Experiment 2 further investigated individual differences in pitch processing and the contribution to talker identification by testing a mediation model. Cumulatively, the results suggested that (a) musical training confers an advantage for talker identification, supporting a shared resources hypothesis regarding music and language and (b) linguistic use of lexical tones also increases accuracy in hearing talker identity. Importantly, these two types of hearing experience enhance talker identification by sharpening pitch perception skills in a domain-general manner.

L2 voice recognition: The role of speaker-, listener-, and stimulus-related factors

“…At the same time, listeners' better performance on day 4 compared to the score predicted by the multinomial logistic regression and the lower correlation between the predicted accuracy and the accuracy scores of the listeners on day 4 than on day 3 seem to indicate that listeners use additional sources, not only low-level acoustic properties of the speech signal, to learn and identify voices. This observation corroborates findings of previous studies, showing that listeners are able to identify voices based only on their acoustic properties (Winters et al, 2008) and perform better if they are good at perceiving pitch differences (Xie and Myers, 2015) when the language is unfamiliar. However, when the language is familiar as in the case with the participants in the present study various additional, language-specific cues are used in voice recognition, while the ability to perceive differences in pitch no longer plays a role in voice recognition in a familiar language (Xie and Myers, 2015).…”

“…This observation corroborates findings of previous studies, showing that listeners are able to identify voices based only on their acoustic properties (Winters et al, 2008) and perform better if they are good at perceiving pitch differences (Xie and Myers, 2015) when the language is unfamiliar. However, when the language is familiar as in the case with the participants in the present study various additional, language-specific cues are used in voice recognition, while the ability to perceive differences in pitch no longer plays a role in voice recognition in a familiar language (Xie and Myers, 2015).…”

Effects of Noise on the Behavioral and Neural Categorization of Speech

“…It should be noted aforementioned neural effects are probably not soley limited to neural generators in the superior temporal gyrus (i.e., auditory cortex) which generate the majority of the scalp auditory ERP (Picton et al, 1999). There is, for example substantial evidence that perception of ambiguous speech sounds is aided by frontal linguistic brain regions (e.g., inferior frontal gyrus, IFG) (Xie and Myers, 2015;Rogers and Davis, 2017). Similarly, we have shown the differential engagement of IFG vs. auditory cortex during vowel categorization strongly depends on stimulus ambiguity and listeners' auditory expertise; more ambiguity and less skilled perceivers more strongly recruit IFG (Bidelman and Walker, 2019).…”

Another bilingual advantage? Perception of talker-voice information

“…This allows us to examine the development of talker processing and also allows us to better control language exposure of the monolingual group. For example, in Xie and Myers (2015) a large portion of the monolingual English, college-attending listeners had studied Spanish, the other UNFAMILIAR language, and no mention of other languages studied by the college students used as listeners was mentioned. We return to this point in the discussion.…”