A search for listener differences in the perception of talker identity

Abstract

Talkers differ along several dimensions that listeners can resolve. These include acoustic effects of native variation in the scale and shape of the articulatory anatomy, and the effects of age and use on the tissues of the vocal tract. Linguistically, talkers differ in phonetic habits occasioned by dialect and idiolect, and differ paralinguistically in manner of affective expression conveyed vocally. However, listeners are themselves likely to vary in sensitivity to intertalker variation. In this study we aimed to identify differences in sensitivity to talker variation as a function of linguistic experience. Speech samples were produced by female talkers 15–17 years old drawn from two dialect groups, one from Brooklyn, NY, and one from Bloomington, IN. Each talker produced sentences in a list-reading task. Listeners in our tests were also native either to Brooklyn or to Bloomington, and each was far more familiar with one dialect than the other. Tests of apparent similarity of talkers in each set were conducted with listeners from the same and different dialect group. The results of similarity scaling analyses calibrate the contribution of sensitivity to idiolectal contrast within and across dialect in the perception of a talker’s characteristics. [Research supported by NIDCD.]