Phonetic sensitivity and individual recognition: Notes on system architecture

Abstract

A perceiver’s ability to identify a familiar talker is often ascribed to the registration of acoustic attributes of vocal quality. In idealizations of this aspect of speech perception, unique long-term characteristics of the glottal source or the supralaryngeal filter of speaking acquaintances are represented in a mental gallery, and function as standards for evaluating unknown signals that challenge the auditory system. The ability to identify a message spoken by a familiar talker inheres in a different set of acoustic properties, those of finer grain that underlie the perception of consonant and vowel sequences useful for lexical retrieval. Neuropsychological reports of a dissociation between aphasia and phonagnosia suggest a system architecture in which the perception of a linguistic message is functionally independent of the perception of the identity of the talker who produced it. The plausibility of this conceptualization will be discussed in the light of perceptual identification and perceptual learning studies of individual identification without recourse to auditory impressions of familiar vocal quality. Evidence will be presented that phonetic attributes are an intrinsic component of the perception and identification of individuals. [Supported by NIDCD.]