Highly accurate and robust identity perception from personally familiar voices.

Abstract

Previous research suggests that familiarity with a voice can afford benefits for voice and speech perception. However, even familiar voice perception has been reported to be error-prone, especially in the face of challenges such as reduced verbal cues and acoustic distortions. It has been hypothesized that such findings may arise due to listeners not being "familiar enough" with the voices used in laboratory studies, and thus being inexperienced with their full vocal repertoire. Extending this idea, voice perception based on highly familiar voices-acquired via substantial, naturalistic experience-should therefore be more robust than voice perception from less familiar voices. We investigated this proposal by contrasting voice perception of personally familiar voices (participants' romantic partners) versus lab-trained voices in challenging experimental tasks. Specifically, we tested how differences in familiarity may affect voice-identity perception from nonverbal vocalizations and acoustically modulated speech. Large benefits for the personally familiar voice over a less familiar, lab-trained voice were found for identity recognition, with listeners displaying both highly accurate yet more conservative recognition of personally familiar voices. However, no familiar-voice benefits were found for speech perception in background noise. Our findings suggest that listeners have fine-tuned representations of highly familiar voices that result in more robust and accurate voice recognition despite challenging listening contexts, yet these advantages may not always extend to speech perception. We conclude that familiarity with voices is indeed on a continuum, with identity perception for personally familiar voices being highly accurate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).