The own-voice benefit for word recognition in early bilinguals

Abstract

The current study examines the self-voice benefit in an early bilingual population. Female Cantonese–English bilinguals produced words containing Cantonese contrasts. A subset of these minimal pairs was selected as stimuli for a perception task. Speakers’ productions were grouped according to how acoustically contrastive their pronunciation of each minimal pair was and these groupings were used to design personalized experiments for each participant, featuring their own voice and the voices of others’ similarly-contrastive tokens. The perception task was a two-alternative forced-choice word identification paradigm in which participants heard isolated Cantonese words, which had undergone synthesis to mask the original talker identity. Listeners were more accurate in recognizing minimal pairs produced in their own (disguised) voice than recognizing the realizations of speakers who maintain similar degrees of phonetic contrast for the same minimal pairs. Generally, individuals with larger phonetic contrasts were also more accurate in word identification for self and other voices overall. These results provide evidence for an own-voice benefit for early bilinguals. These results suggest that the phonetic distributions that undergird phonological contrasts are heavily shaped by one’s own phonetic realizations.

Neural Effects of One’s Own Voice on Self-Talk for Emotion Regulation

“…This attractiveness can be explained by vocal implicit egoism, a form of self-enhancement driven by the familiarity effect and self-positivity bias [12]. Phonetic realizations of one's own voice significantly shape phonological contrasts, leading to more accurate recognition of words in one's own voice compared to the voices of others [13]. In addition, as individuals become accustomed to their own voices through lifelong exposure, hearing their own voice exhibits the phenomenon of neural sharpening, in which more common stimuli reduce neural responses to them, and thus it lowers the level of activation of the superior temporal gyrus (STG), which is involved in neural sharpening for voices [14].…”