On the perception of qualitative and phonetic similarities among voices

Abstract

A perceiver who learns to recognize an individual talker becomes familiar with attributes of the talker’s voice that are present in any utterance regardless of the linguistic message. Customary accounts of individual identification by ear presume that such durable personal aspects of an individual’s speech are graded qualities (e.g., vocal pitch and pitch range; melodious, breathy, or raspy timbre; etc.) independent of the acoustic properties that evoke segmental phonetic contrasts. Alternatively, some classic and recent studies alike suggest that familiarity includes attention to attributes of dialect and idiolect conveyed in the articulation of consonants and vowels. These linguistic phonetic properties of speech are effective for recognizing a talker when voice quality is eliminated as a source of information. The present investigation sought direct evidence of attention to qualitative and phonetic attributes of speech. Natural samples and sine wave replicas of sentences spoken by five male and five female talkers were used in a similarity tournament with adult listeners. The results establish the differential perceptual resolution of qualitative and phonetic attributes in the perception and recognition of talkers. [Work supported by NIDCD and NICHD.]