Language Familiarity Effect Research Articles

Foreign language talker identification does not generalize to new talkers.

Listeners identify talkers less accurately in a foreign language than in their native language, but it remains unclear whether this language-familiarity effect arises because listeners (1) simply lack experience identifying foreign-language talkers or (2) gain access to additional talker-specific information during concurrent linguistic processing of talkers' speech. Here, we tested whether sustained practice identifying talkers of an unfamiliar, foreign language could lead to generalizable improvement in learning to identify new talkers speaking that language, even if listeners remained unable to understand the talkers' speech. English-speaking adults with no prior experience with Mandarin practiced learning to identify Mandarin-speaking talkers over four consecutive days and were tested on their ability to generalize their Mandarin talker-identification abilities to new Mandarin-speaking talkers on the fourth day. In a "same-voices" training condition, listeners learned to identify the same talkers for the first 3days and new talkers on the fourth day; in a "different-voices" condition, listeners learned to identify a different set of voices on each day including the fourth day. Listeners in the same-voices condition showed daily improvement in talker identification across the first 3days but returned to baseline when trying to learn new talkers on the fourth day, whereas listeners in the different-voices condition showed no improvement across the 4days. After 4days, neither group demonstrated generalized improvement in learning new Mandarin-speaking talkers versus their baseline performance. These results suggest that, in the absence of specific linguistic knowledge, listeners are unable to develop generalizable foreign-language talker-identification abilities.

Neural basis of language familiarity effects on voice recognition: An fNIRS study

Recognizing talkers' identity via speech is an important social skill in interpersonal interaction. Behavioral evidence has shown that listeners can identify better the voices of their native language than those of a non-native language, which is known as the language familiarity effect (LFE). However, its underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. This study therefore investigated how the LFE occurs at the neural level by employing functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Late unbalanced bilinguals were first asked to learn to associate strangers' voices with their identities and then tested for recognizing the talkers' identities based on their voices speaking a language either highly familiar (i.e., native language Chinese), or moderately familiar (i.e., second language English), or completely unfamiliar (i.e., Ewe) to participants. Participants identified talkers the most accurately in Chinese and the least accurately in Ewe. Talker identification was quicker in Chinese than in English and Ewe but reaction time did not differ between the two non-native languages. At the neural level, recognizing voices speaking Chinese relative to English/Ewe produced less activity in the inferior frontal gyrus, precentral/postcentral gyrus, supramarginal gyrus, and superior temporal sulcus/gyrus while no difference was found between English and Ewe, indicating facilitation of voice identification by the automatic phonological encoding in the native language. These findings shed new light on the interrelations between language ability and voice recognition, revealing that the brain activation pattern of the LFE depends on the automaticity of language processing.

Effects of language familiarity, utterance length, and speech quality in prosodic boundary identification

Abstract This study investigates the effects of several stimulus sources: language familiarity, utterance length, and speech quality, on listeners’ predictions of the sizes of the upcoming prosodic boundaries. Experiments with native Taiwanese speakers were conducted, and the stimuli varied in prosodic boundary units (i.e., word, phrase, and sentence), languages (i.e., Taiwanese, English, and Swedish), utterance lengths (i.e., 2-second, and 2 syllables; the latter is approximately 0.416-second long), and speech qualities (i.e., normal speech, low-pass filtered speech). Results showed that: (a) listeners performed better when the utterances were longer; (b) listeners performed better in low-pass filtered speech when they had no prior knowledge of the target language; (c) there was a tendency for the language familiarity effect, but this effect was heavily influenced by the extent of similarity of the phonetic realizations in different prosodic boundaries, and the listeners’ language proficiency which was associated with working memory storage capacity.

Algorithmic voice transformations reveal the phonological basis of language-familiarity effects in cross-cultural emotion judgments.

People have a well-described advantage in identifying individuals and emotions in their own culture, a phenomenon also known as the other-race and language-familiarity effect. However, it is unclear whether native-language advantages arise from genuinely enhanced capacities to extract relevant cues in familiar speech or, more simply, from cultural differences in emotional expressions. Here, to rule out production differences, we use algorithmic voice transformations to create French and Japanese stimulus pairs that differed by exactly the same acoustical characteristics. In two cross-cultural experiments, participants performed better in their native language when categorizing vocal emotional cues and detecting non-emotional pitch changes. This advantage persisted over three types of stimulus degradation (jabberwocky, shuffled and reversed sentences), which disturbed semantics, syntax, and supra-segmental patterns, respectively. These results provide evidence that production differences are not the sole drivers of the language-familiarity effect in cross-cultural emotion perception. Listeners' unfamiliarity with the phonology of another language, rather than with its syntax or semantics, impairs the detection of pitch prosodic cues and, in turn, the recognition of expressive prosody.

How Different Types of Linguistic Information Impact Voice Perception: Evidence From the Language-Familiarity Effect.

Previous studies have suggested the effect of linguistic information on voice perception (e.g., the language-familiarity effect [LFE]). However, it remains unclear which type of specific information in speech contributes to voice perception, including acoustic, phonological, lexical, and semantic information. It is also underexamined whether the roles of these different types of information are modulated by the experimental paradigm (speaker discrimination vs. speaker identification). In this study, we conducted two experiments to investigate these issues regarding LFEs. Experiment 1 examined the roles of acoustic and phonological information in speaker discrimination and identification with forward and time-reversed Mandarin and Indonesian sentences. Experiment 2 further identified the roles of phonological, lexical, and semantic information with forward, word-scrambled, and reconstructed (consisting of pseudo-Mandarin words) Mandarin and forward Indonesian sentences. For Mandarin-only participants, in Experiment 1, speaker discrimination was more accurate for forward than reversed sentences, but there was no LFE in either sentence. Speaker identification was also more accurate for forward than reversed sentences, whereas there was an LFE for forward sentences. In Experiment 2, speaker discrimination was better for word-scrambled than reconstructed Mandarin sentences. Speaker identification was more accurate for forward and word-scrambled Mandarin sentences but less accurate for Mandarin reconstructed and forward Indonesian sentences. In general, the pattern of the results for Indonesian learners was the same as that for Mandarin-only speakers. These results suggest that different kinds of information support speaker discrimination and identification in native and unfamiliar languages. The LFE in speaker identification depends on both phonological and lexical information.

Can language modulate perceptual narrowing for faces? Other-race face recognition in infants is modulated by language experience

Between 6 and 9 months, while infant’s ability to discriminate faces within their own racial group is maintained, discrimination of faces within other-race groups declines to a point where 9-month-old infants fail to discriminate other-race faces. Such face perception narrowing can be overcome in various ways at 9 or 12 months of age, such as presenting faces with emotional expressions. Can language itself modulate face narrowing? Many adult studies suggest that language has an impact on the recognition of individuals. For example, adults remember faces previously paired with their native language more accurately than faces paired with a non-native language. We have previously found that from 9 months of age, own-race faces associated with the native language can be learned and recognized whereas own-race faces associated with a non-native language cannot. Based on the language familiarity effect, we hypothesized that the native language could restore recognition of other-race faces after perceptual narrowing has happened. We tested 9- and 12-month-old Caucasian infants. During a familiarization phase, infants were shown still photographs of an Asian face while audio was played either in the native or in the non-native language. Immediately after the familiarization, the familiar face and a novel one were displayed side-by-side for the recognition test. We compared the proportional looking time to the new face to the chance level. Both 9- and 12-month-old infants exhibited recognition memory for the other-race face when familiarized with non-native speech, but not with their native speech. Native language did not facilitate recognition of other-race faces after 9 months of age but a non-native language did, suggesting that 9- and 12-month-olds already have expectations about which language an individual should talk (or at least not talk). Our results confirm the strong links between face and speech processing during infancy.

The Other Accent Effect in Talker Recognition: Now You See It, Now You Don't.

The existence of the Language Familiarity Effect (LFE), where talkers of a familiar language are easier to identify than talkers of an unfamiliar language, is well-documented and uncontroversial. However, a closely related phenomenon known as the Other Accent Effect (OAE), where accented talkers are more difficult to recognize, is less well understood. There are several possible explanations for why the OAE exists, but to date, little data exist to adjudicate differences between them. Here, we begin to address this issue by directly comparing listeners' recognition of talkers who speak in different types of accents, and by examining both the LFE and OAE in the same set of listeners. Specifically, Canadian English listeners were tested on their ability to recognize talkers within four types of voice line-ups: Canadian English talkers, Australian English talkers, Mandarin-accented English talkers, and Mandarin talkers. We predicted that the OAE would be present for talkers of Mandarin-accented English but not for talkers of Australian English-which is precisely what we observed. We also observed a disconnect between listeners' confidence and performance across different types of accents; that is, listeners performed equally poorly with Mandarin and Mandarin-accented talkers, but they were more confident with their performance with the latter group of talkers. The present findings set the stage for further investigation into the nature of the OAE by exploring a range of potential explanations for the effect, and introducing important implications for forensic scientists' evaluation of ear witness testimony.

Language-familiarity effect on voice recognition by blind listeners.

The current study compared the language-familiarity effect on voice recognition by blind listeners and sighted individuals. Both groups performed better on the recognition of native voices than nonnative voices, but the language-familiarity effect is smaller in the blind than in the sighted group, with blind individuals performing better than their sighted counterparts only on the recognition of nonnative voices. Furthermore, recognition of native and nonnative voices was significantly correlated only in the blind group. These results indicate that language familiarity affects voice recognition by blind listeners, who differ to some extent from their sighted counterparts in the use of linguistic and nonlinguistic features during voice recognition.

Bilingual talker identification with spontaneous speech in Cantonese and English: The role of language-specific knowledge

Previous research has shown that implicit or explicit knowledge about a language lends itself to improved talker recognition performance. In the context of this language familiarity effect, it is apparent that bilinguals are better at generalizing voice learning across their known languages compared to monolingual listeners [Orena et al., JASA, 146 (2019)]. Other work suggests that training in an unknown language generalizes to a known language more robustly than the reverse [Winters et al., JASA 123 (2008)]. The current study launches from these previous studies. This project uses excerpted Cantonese and English snippets from spontaneous interview speech from Cantonese-English bilinguals in a talker identification training experiment with Cantonese-English bilingual listeners and bilingual listeners with no knowledge of Cantonese (or related languages). Listeners are assigned to either Cantonese or English training, and then all listeners are tested on both Cantonese and English utterances to assess learning for the trained language and generalization to the bilingual's second language. Results of a multilingual questionnaire quantify listeners' code-switching abilities and multilingual competence, which, given prior research, should account for some individual differences. Using spontaneous productions, as opposed to read speech, improves the ecological validity of this research and broadens its implications.

Talker Processing in Mandarin-Speaking Congenital Amusics.

Purpose The ability to recognize individuals from their vocalizations is an important trait of human beings. In the current study, we aimed to examine how congenital amusia, an inborn pitch-processing disorder, affects discrimination and identification of talkers' voices. Method Twenty Mandarin-speaking amusics and 20 controls were tested on talker discrimination and identification in four types of contexts that varied in the degree of language familiarity: Mandarin real words, Mandarin pseudowords, Arabic words, and reversed Mandarin speech. Results The language familiarity effect was more evident in the talker identification task than the discrimination task for both participant groups, and talker identification accuracy decreased as native phonological representations were removed from the stimuli. Importantly, amusics demonstrated degraded performance in both native speech conditions that contained phonological/linguistic information to facilitate talker identification and nonnative conditions where talker voice processing primarily relied on phonetics cues, including pitch. Moreover, the performance in talker processing can be predicted by the participants' musical ability and phonological memory capacity. Conclusions The results provided a first set of behavioral evidence that individuals with amusia are impaired in the ability of human voice identification. Meanwhile, it is found that amusia is not only a pitch disorder but is likely to affect the phonological processing of speech, in terms of using phonological information in native speech to analyze a talker's identity. The above findings expanded the understanding of the nature and scope of congenital amusia. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12170379.

Hierarchical contributions of linguistic knowledge to talker identification: Phonological versus lexical familiarity.

Listeners identify talkers more accurately when listening to their native language compared to an unfamiliar, foreign language. This language-familiarity effect in talker identification has been shown to arise from familiarity with both the sound patterns (phonetics and phonology) and the linguistic content (words) of one's native language. However, it has been unknown whether these two sources of information contribute independently to talker identification abilities, particularly whether hearing familiar words can facilitate talker identification in the absence of familiar phonetics. To isolate the contribution of lexical familiarity, we conducted three experiments that tested listeners' ability to identify talkers saying familiar words, but with unfamiliar phonetics. In two experiments, listeners identified talkers from recordings of their native language (English), an unfamiliar foreign language (Mandarin Chinese), or "hybrid" speech stimuli (sentences spoken in Mandarin, but which can be convincingly coerced to sound like English when presented with subtitles that prime plausible English-language lexical interpretations based on the Mandarin phonetics). In a third experiment, we explored natural variation in lexical-phonetic congruence as listeners identified talkers with varying degrees of a Mandarin accent. Priming listeners to hear English speech did not improve their ability to identify talkers speaking Mandarin, even after additional training, and talker identification accuracy decreased as talkers' phonetics became increasingly dissimilar to American English. Together, these experiments indicate that unfamiliar sound patterns preclude talker identification benefits otherwise afforded by familiar words. These results suggest that linguistic representations contribute hierarchically to talker identification; the facilitatory effect of familiar words requires the availability of familiar phonological forms.

Sub-regional ‘other-accent’ effects on lay listeners’ speaker identification abilities

Previous studies have shown that listeners perform worse in speaker identification experiments when they are unfamiliar with the accents of the speakers. Such effects have been documented for listeners hearing unfamiliar foreign languages (language familiarity effect) and unfamiliar regional accents ('other-accent' effect). The present study investigates the 'other-accent' effect at a sub-regional level. Listeners from three different localities (Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough) within the same greater dialectal region (the North East of England) participated in one of three target-present voice line-ups using samples spoken by speakers from one of the three localities. Listeners who heard a voice line-up in their own local accent (ingroup listeners) missed the target speaker's voice significantly less often than listeners who heard a voice line-up comprised of speakers of one of the other two local accents (out-group listeners). The proportions of correct hits and false alarms were approximately similar across in-group and out-group listeners.

The native-language benefit for talker identification is robust in 7.5-month-old infants.

Adults recognize talkers better when the talkers speak a familiar language than when they speak an unfamiliar language. This language familiarity effect (LFE) demonstrates the inseparable nature of linguistic and indexical information in adult spoken language processing. Relatively little is known about children's integration of linguistic and indexical information in speech. For example, to date, only one study has explored the LFE in infants. Here, we sought to better understand the maturation of speech processing abilities in infants by replicating this earlier study using a more stringent experimental design (eliminating a potential voice-language confound), a different test population (English- rather than Dutch-learning infants), and a new language pairing (English vs. Polish rather than Dutch vs. Italian or Japanese). Furthermore, we explored the language exposure conditions required for infants to develop an LFE for a formerly unfamiliar language. We hypothesized based on previous studies (including the perceptual narrowing literature) that infants might develop an LFE more readily than would adults. Although our findings replicate those of the earlier study-demonstrating that the LFE is robust in 7.5-month-olds-we found no evidence that infants need less language exposure than do adults to develop an LFE. We concluded that both infants and adults need extensive (potentially live) exposure to an unfamiliar language before talker identification in that language improves. Moreover, our study suggests that the LFE is likely rooted in early emerging phonology rather than shared lexical knowledge and that infants already closely resemble adults in their processing of linguistic and indexical information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Methodological considerations for interpreting the Language Familiarity Effect in talker processing.

The Language Familiarity Effect (LFE)-where listeners are better at processing talker-voice information in their native language than in an unfamiliar language-has received renewed attention in the past 10 years. Numerous studies have sought to probe the underlying causes of this advantage by cleverly manipulating aspects of the stimuli (using phonologically related languages, backwards speech, nonwords) and by examining individual differences across listeners (testing reading ability and pitch perception). Most of these studies find evidence for the importance of phonological information or phonological processing as a supporting mechanism for the LFE. What has not been carefully examined, however, are how other methodological considerations such as task effects and stimulus length can change performance on talker-voice processing tasks. In this review, I provide an overview of the literature on the LFE and examine how methodological decisions affect the presence or absence of the LFE. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain Psychology > Language.

Liu vs. Liu vs. Luke? Name influence on voice recall

ABSTRACTListeners are better at remembering voices speaking in familiar languages and accents, and this finding is often dubbed the language-familiarity effect (LFE). A potential mechanism behind the LFE relates to a combination of listeners’ implicit knowledge about lower level phonetic cues and higher level linguistic processes. While previous work has established that listeners’ social expectations influence various aspects of linguistic processing and speech perception, it remains unknown how such expectations might affect talker recognition. To this end, Mandarin-accented English voices and locally accented English voices were used in a talker recognition paradigm in conditions which paired voices with stereotypically congruent names (Mandarin-accented English voice as Chen and locally accented English voice as Connor) and stereotypically incongruent names (vice versa). Across two experiments, listeners showed greater recall for the familiar, local voices than the Mandarin-accented ones, confirming the basic premise of the LFE. Further, incongruent accent/name pairings negatively affected listeners’ performance, although listeners with experience speaking Mandarin were less influenced by the incongruent accent/name pairings. These results indicate that the LFE, while relying largely on listeners’ ability to parse linguistic information, is also affected by nonlinguistic information about a talker’s social identity.

Effects of language experience and task demands on talker recognition by children and adults.

Talker recognition is a language-dependent process, with listeners recognizing talkers better when the talkers speak a familiar versus an unfamiliar language. This language familiarity effect (LFE) is firmly established in adults, but its developmental trajectory in children is not well understood. Some evidence suggests that the effect already exists in infancy, but little is known about how it unfolds in childhood. The present study explored whether the strength of the LFE increases in early childhood. Adults and children were tested in their native language and a foreign language using a "same-different" talker discrimination task and a "voice line-up" talker recognition task. Results showed that adults and 6-year-olds, but not 5-year-olds, exhibit a robust LFE, suggesting that the effect strengthens as children's language competence increases. For both adults and older children, the emergence of an LFE moreover appeared to be task-dependent. This study contributes to a better understanding of how children develop mature talker recognition abilities and when children's processing of indexical and linguistic information in speech approaches adult-like levels. Furthermore, the findings reported here contribute to the debates regarding the origins of the LFE-a hallmark of adult talker recognition.

The effects of lexical and phonological factors on talker processing

Previous research has shown that listeners are better at processing talker information in their native language compared to an unfamiliar language, a phenomenon known as the Language Familiarity Effect. Several studies have explored the cause of this effect. Some have argued that it is tied to the lexicon and the ability to comprehend, while others have suggested that it is the familiarity with the phonology. In the current study, we use an AX discrimination task to test these two factors simultaneously by manipulating lexical status (words/nonwords) and phonotactic probability (high/low). We also test individual differences in reading ability, as poor phonological awareness skills are linked to reading impairment. Twenty-four native speakers of American English completed the AX task and a battery of phonological awareness tasks. Reaction time results revealed an interaction between lexical status and phonotactic probability: words with high phonotactic probability were processed faster than words with low phonotactic probability, but no difference was found for the nonwords. Sensitivity (A’) revealed no effects of lexical status or phonotactic probability, but did reveal that listeners with higher reading scores were more sensitive to talker differences.

Perceptual similarity judgments of voices: Effects of talker and listener language, vocal source acoustics, and time-reversal

Listeners demonstrate reliable perceptual biases favoring voices speaking their native language versus those speaking a foreign language. This “language-familiarity effect” for voice processing has been found even for perceptual similarity judgments: Voices speaking listeners’ native language sound less alike, even when those recordings have been rendered incomprehensible via time-reversal. Here, we sought to replicate and extend this finding of linguistic effects on voice similarity. Native English- and Mandarin-speaking listeners (both N = 40) rated the perceptual similarity of voices speaking English or Mandarin (both N = 20) for either time-reversed or forward speech. Both listener groups tended to find Mandarin-speaking voices more dissimilar, but this effect was reduced for English-speaking listeners, especially for forward speech. Perceptual similarity judgments of voices were always highly correlated between listener groups and between forward/time-reversed speech. Acoustic measurements (voice fundamental frequency mean and variance, local jitter, harmonics-to-noise ratio, speech rate, and formant dispersion) were also made to ascertain how listeners’ perceptual similarity judgments were related to speech acoustics and whether these relationships differed under time-reversal or across listeners’ or talkers’ native language. Overall, these data suggest that, while native language may influence perceptual dissimilarity of voices, the magnitude of these effects tend to be very small.

Abstraction and the (Misnamed) Language Familiarity Effect.

Talkers are recognized more accurately if they are speaking the listeners' native language rather than an unfamiliar language. This "language familiarity effect" has been shown not to depend upon comprehension and must instead involve language sound patterns. We further examine the level of sound-pattern processing involved, by comparing talker recognition in foreign languages versus two varieties of English, by (a) English speakers of one variety, (b) English speakers of the other variety, and (c) non-native listeners (more familiar with one of the varieties). All listener groups performed better with native than foreign speech, but no effect of language variety appeared: Native listeners discriminated talkers equally well in each, with the native variety never outdoing the other variety, and non-native listeners discriminated talkers equally poorly in each, irrespective of the variety's familiarity. The results suggest that this talker recognition effect rests not on simple familiarity, but on an abstract level of phonological processing.

The native language benefit for voice recognition is not contingent on lexical access

Listeners show heightened talker recognition for native compared to nonnative speech, formalized as the language familiarity effect (LFE) for voice recognition. Some findings suggest that language comprehension is the locus of the LFE, while others implicate expertise with the linguistic sound structure. These hypotheses yield different predictions for the LFE with time-reversed speech, a manipulation that precludes lexical access but preserves some indexical and phonetic properties. Research to date shows discrepant results for the LFE with this impoverished signal. Here we reconcile this discrepancy by examining how the amount of exposure to talkers’ voices influences the LFE for time-reversed speech. Three experiments were conducted. In all, two groups of English monolinguals were trained and then tested on the identification of four English talkers and four French talkers; one group heard natural speech and the other group heard time-reversed speech. Across the experiments, we manipulated exposure to ...