Training listeners to report fundamental frequency and formant range information independently.

Abstract

The vowels of speakers of different sizes vary in terms of their average f0 and formant frequencies. In general, larger speakers produce vowels with lower formant frequencies and lower f0s. Listeners have demonstrated the ability to estimate the approximate size of a speaker and previous experiments have shown that these judgments are based on the joint consideration of f0 and formant range information. Thus both lower f0s and lower formant frequency ranges are associated with larger speakers by listeners. Studies which have asked listeners to evaluate voices have focused on the extraction of apparent speaker characteristics (which are informed by f0 and formant frequencies) rather than asking speakers to report f0 and formant range information directly. The current study consists of a training procedure by which participants will learn to report the f0 and formant range of voices independently. The training consists of a voice matching game in which participants hear a pair of vowels produced by a voice and are asked to indicate which of the candidate voices they just heard. Results will be analyzed in light of current theories of vowel perception and normalization.