Abstract
The current study compared the language-familiarity effect on voice recognition by blind listeners and sighted individuals. Both groups performed better on the recognition of native voices than nonnative voices, but the language-familiarity effect is smaller in the blind than in the sighted group, with blind individuals performing better than their sighted counterparts only on the recognition of nonnative voices. Furthermore, recognition of native and nonnative voices was significantly correlated only in the blind group. These results indicate that language familiarity affects voice recognition by blind listeners, who differ to some extent from their sighted counterparts in the use of linguistic and nonlinguistic features during voice recognition.
Highlights
Spoken language carries two distinct kinds of information that can be extracted simultaneously by listeners to apprehend the linguistic form of the message and to recognize the paralinguistic personal attributes of the speaker
Further simple effect analyses revealed that blind listeners performed better than their sighted counterparts on the recognition of nonnative voices [F(1, 38) 1⁄4 11.005, p 1⁄4 0.002, partial g2 1⁄4 0.225], but not on the recognition of native voices [F(1, 38) 1⁄4 3.001, p 1⁄4 0.091, partial g2 1⁄4 0.073], indicating that the superiority in voice recognition by blind listeners over sighted listeners was modulated by language condition
Similar to the own-race effect on face recognition by which observers are typically better at recognizing faces from their own race compared with a different racial group (Valentine, 1991; Meissner and Brigham, 2001), the language-familiarity effect on voice recognition is behaviorally robust across a diverse range of languages (Goggin et al, 1991; K€oster and Schiller, 1997; Winters et al, 2008; Fleming et al, 2014)
Summary
Spoken language carries two distinct kinds of information that can be extracted simultaneously by listeners to apprehend the linguistic form of the message and to recognize the paralinguistic personal attributes of the speaker. Voice recognition is influenced by linguistic knowledge and language familiarity: dyslexic listeners with phonological deficits are impaired in the recognition of native voices (Perrachione et al, 2011), and listeners typically perform better on the recognition of their native voices than nonnative (i.e., native speakers of listeners’ nonnative languages) voices (Goggin et al, 1991). The superiority in the recognition of native over nonnative voices is defined as language-familiarity effect, which emerges in early infancy (Johnson et al, 2011; Fetcher and Johnson, 2019) and has been observed in multiple cross-language studies involving language pairs such as Spanish and German (K€oster and Schiller, 1997), German and English (Winters et al, 2008), and Chinese and English (Fleming et al, 2014). The infant data, in particular, demonstrate a dependence between linguistic and nonlinguistic processing as early as 4.5 months of age without necessarily requiring sophisticated linguistic knowledge or language proficiency
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