Abstract
Familiar and unfamiliar voice perception are often understood as being distinct from each other. For identity perception, theoretical work has proposed that listeners use acoustic information in different ways to perceive identity from familiar and unfamiliar voices: Unfamiliar voices are thought to be processed based on close comparisons of acoustic properties, while familiar voices are processed based on diagnostic acoustic features that activate a stored person-specific representation of that voice. To date no empirical study has directly examined whether and how familiar and unfamiliar listeners differ in their use of acoustic information for identity perception. Here, we tested this theoretical claim by linking listeners' judgements in voice identity tasks to complex acoustic representation — spectral similarity of the heard voice recordings. Participants (N = 177) who were either familiar or unfamiliar with a set of voices completed an identity discrimination task (Experiment 1) or an identity sorting task (Experiment 2). In both experiments, identity judgements for familiar and unfamiliar voices were guided by spectral similarity: Pairs of recordings with greater acoustic similarity were more likely to be perceived as belonging to the same voice identity. However, while there were no differences in how familiar and unfamiliar listeners used acoustic information for identity discrimination, differences were apparent for identity sorting. Our study therefore challenges proposals that view familiar and unfamiliar voice perception as being at all times distinct. Instead, our data suggest a critical role of the listening situation in which familiar and unfamiliar voices are evaluated, thus characterising voice identity perception as a highly dynamic process in which listeners opportunistically make use of any kind of information they can access.
Highlights
From merely hearing a voice, listeners can form a wealth of impres sions about the person who is speaking: Is the person male or female? Do they sound friendly? Are they familiar? Amongst these impressions, the process of trying to work out exactly whose voice we are hearing — i.e. identity perception — has received substantial attention in the literature (e.g. Kreiman & Sidtis, 2011; Mathias & von Kriegstein, 2014)
As predicted we find that both listener groups make use of the acoustic information as indexed by our measure of acoustic similarity, for both stimulus sets: The more similar the acoustic properties of a pair of voice recordings, the more likely listeners are to judge these two recordings as coming from the same voice identity
Despite the similarities in the use of acoustic information for voice identity discrimination between familiar and unfamiliar listeners, we note marked differences in overall task performance between the two listener groups: Familiar listeners were, on average, more accurate in their voice discrimination behaviour than unfamiliar listeners. We argue that this familiarity benefit must be either driven by 1) differences in task strategy or decision making, 2) familiar listeners being able to access other sources of information to aid their identity judgements, such as being able to access a mental representation of the familiar voices or 3) potentially by acoustic properties of voice recordings that are not captured by the spectral representations we use here, since the relationship between acoustic similarity and identity judgements was similar for familiar and unfa miliar listeners
Summary
From merely hearing a voice, listeners can form a wealth of impres sions about the person who is speaking: Is the person male or female? Do they sound friendly? Are they familiar? Amongst these impressions, the process of trying to work out exactly whose voice we are hearing — i.e. identity perception — has received substantial attention in the literature (e.g. Kreiman & Sidtis, 2011; Mathias & von Kriegstein, 2014). The process of trying to work out exactly whose voice we are hearing — i.e. identity perception — has received substantial attention in the literature Kreiman & Sidtis, 2011; Mathias & von Kriegstein, 2014) Within this literature, two broad streams of research have emerged: Studies that consider perception of familiar identities from voices, and studies that examine the perception of unfamiliar voices. Stevenage, 2018 for a recent review) This view is based on, and sup ported by, empirical findings that outline differences between familiar and unfamiliar voice identity perception. Listeners are presented with a pair of voice recordings and are asked to judge whether the two recordings
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