Vocal emotion adaptation aftereffects within and across speaker genders: Roles of timbre and fundamental frequency

Abstract

While the human perceptual system constantly adapts to the environment, some of the underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood. For instance, although previous research demonstrated perceptual aftereffects in emotional voice adaptation, the contribution of different vocal cues to these effects is unclear. In two experiments, we used parameter-specific morphing of adaptor voices to investigate the relative roles of fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre in vocal emotion adaptation, using angry and fearful utterances. Participants adapted to voices containing emotion-specific information in either F0 or timbre, with all other parameters kept constant at an intermediate 50% morph level. Full emotional voices and ambiguous voices were used as reference conditions. All adaptor stimuli were either of the same (Experiment 1) or opposite speaker gender (Experiment 2) of subsequently presented target voices. In Experiment 1, we found consistent aftereffects in all adaptation conditions. Crucially, aftereffects following timbre adaptation were much larger than following F0 adaptation and were only marginally smaller than those following full adaptation. In Experiment 2, adaptation aftereffects appeared massively and proportionally reduced, with differences between morph types being no longer significant. These results suggest that timbre plays a larger role than F0 in vocal emotion adaptation, and that vocal emotion adaptation is compromised by eliminating gender-correspondence between adaptor and target stimuli. Our findings also add to mounting evidence suggesting a major role of timbre in auditory adaptation.