Voice familiarity helps infants tackle variability in the speech signal.

Abstract

The acoustic realization of lexical items produced by different speakers can vary greatly. Current research suggests that infants, unlike adults, struggle to cope with this lack of invariance in the realization of words. Although 7.5-month olds are able to recognize words across different utterances when produced by speakers of the same gender with similar voices, they fail to do so when target words produced in a female voice are subsequently produced in a male voice [Houston and Jusczyk (2000)]. Note that all work in this area has used disembodied unfamiliar voices to test infants. In the current study, we ask whether infants might perform better under more ecologically valid conditions, i.e., when tested on familiar rather than unfamiliar voices. Using the headturn preference procedure, infants were familiarized with passages spoken by their mother. During the test phase, they were presented with their father’s voice producing isolated repetitions of familiarized target words. Preliminary results suggest that infants may recognize words across different utterances produced by speakers of different genders if they are highly familiar with both the male and female speakers. In other words, infants may handle variability in the realization of words better when tested on familiar rather than unfamiliar voices.