Becoming familiar with a talker from natural and sinusoidal sentences

Abstract

This report describes the results of a perceptual training study that was designed to explore how listeners learn to categorize novel voices and how knowledge of a familiar voice generalizes to novel utterances. The speech samples from which the listeners learned to identify individuals were of two kinds: Naturally produced English sentences and sinewave replicas of these sentences. The sinewave items were nonspeech tonal patterns that preserved coarse-grained properties of the talker’s vocal tract transfer function while eliminating traditional cues to voice quality. Listeners were trained over several days to identify ten talkers from sinewave or natural speech sentences. Knowledge about the talker’s voice was then assessed using two generalization tests in which listeners heard a novel set of sentences and identifed the speaker. One generalization test presented sinewave sentences whereas the other presented naturally produced sentences. The results showed that perceptual learning of a talker’s voice can occur even when specific acoustic products of vocal articulation are eliminated from the signal, and that this knowledge generalizes to novel utterances produced by these same talkers. [Work supported by NIH-NIDCD.]