Abstract
Human voices are individual and humans have elaborate skills in recognizing speakers by their voice, phenomena that are deeply rooted in the evolution of human behavior. To date, the mechanisms of speaker recognition are not well understood because of the high variability of the acoustic cues to a speaker’s identity. We wondered what role the speaker plays in making his/her voice more or less well recognizable. While it is evident from the literature that humans can control vocal properties to enhance their intelligibility, it is unclear whether speakers can and/or do control vocal characteristics to be better recognizable and whether such control mechanisms play a role in the communication process. In this paper, we reviewed results from the literature supporting the view that speaker idiosyncratic information is dynamic and that humans have the ability to control how well they can be recognized. We suggest possible experimental setups by which the control over identity in voice can be tested and present pilot acoustic characteristics of speech that was produced to be either targeted at being (a) intelligible (clear speech) and (b) suitable for person recognition (identity marked speech). Results revealed that there is reason to believe that speakers apply different mechanisms when making their individuality identifiable as opposed to making their speech better understood. We discuss predictions that a control of recognizability and intelligibility has within major theories of speech perception.
Highlights
February 10th 2019: Eliza D. makes her way home through a dark subway when a masked attacker grabs her from behind and commands in a whispered, foreign-accented voice: “Give me your money, quick!”
It could be concluded that clear speech was just a stronger form of identity marked speech
Looking at average long-time formants 1 and 2, we found that F2 was comparatively high in identity marked speech, while formant variability of F1 was lowest of all styles
Summary
February 10th 2019: Eliza D. makes her way home through a dark subway when a masked attacker grabs her from behind and commands in a whispered, foreign-accented voice: “Give me your money, quick!”. McAleer et al, 2014), it supports her in building up and position herself in social groups (Schegloff, 1979), it contains information about her fertility (Fisher et al, 2011; Raj et al, 2010), it attracts the right mating partner (Bruckert et al, 2010; Collins, 2001; Collins & Missing, 2003) and contributes to the trust that others have in her (Belin et al, 2017; O’Connor & Barclay, 2017; Oleszkiewicz et al, 2017) Her voice supports listeners in paying attention to her in the environment of other voices (Johnstrude et al, 2013) and it contributes to her esthetic appearance in casual or artistic activities like singing (Doscher, 1993; Sundberg, 1977). We outline predictions that a control of idiosyncratic properties has on information processing in major theories (abstractionist and exemplar models) of speech perception (section 6)
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