Zäske Romi, Fritz Christiane, Schweinberger Stefan R
Department for General Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Institute of Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Am Steiger 3, Haus 1, D-07743 Jena, Germany.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2013 Apr;75(3):603-13. doi: 10.3758/s13414-012-0420-y.
Adaptation to male voices causes a subsequent voice to be perceived as more female, and vice versa. Similar contrastive aftereffects have been reported for phonetic perception, and in vision for face perception. However, while aftereffects in the perception of phonetic features of speech have been reported to persist even when adaptors were processed inattentively, face aftereffects were previously reported to be abolished by inattention to adaptors. Here we demonstrate that auditory aftereffects of adaptation to voice gender are eliminated when the male and female adaptor voices are spatially unattended. Participants simultaneously heard gender-specific male or female adaptor voices in one ear and gender-neutral (androgynous) adaptor voices in the contralateral ear. They selectively attended to the adaptor voices in a designated ear, by either classifying voice gender (Exp. 1) or spoken syllable (Exp. 2). Voice aftereffects were found only if the gender-specific voices were spatially attended, suggesting capacity limits in the processing of voice gender for the unattended ear. Remarkably, gender-specific adaptors in the attended ear elicited comparable aftereffects in test voices, regardless of prior attention to voice gender or phonetic content. Thus, within the attended ear, voice gender was processed even when it was irrelevant for the task at hand, suggesting automatic processing of gender along with linguistic information. Overall, voice gender adaptation requires spatial, but not dimensional, selective attention.
对男性声音的适应会使随后听到的声音被感知为更具女性特质，反之亦然。在语音感知以及视觉中的面部感知方面也有类似的对比后效应的报道。然而，虽然据报道，即使在不经意间处理适应刺激时，语音特征感知中的后效应仍会持续，但之前有报道称，对面部适应刺激的不注意会消除面部后效应。在此，我们证明，当男性和女性适应声音在空间上未被注意时，对声音性别的听觉后效应会被消除。参与者同时在一只耳朵中听到特定性别的男性或女性适应声音，在对侧耳朵中听到中性（雌雄同体）适应声音。他们通过对声音性别进行分类（实验1）或对语音音节进行分类（实验2），有选择地关注指定耳朵中的适应声音。只有当特定性别的声音在空间上被注意到时，才会发现声音后效应，这表明未被注意耳朵在处理声音性别方面存在能力限制。值得注意的是，无论之前是否关注声音性别或语音内容，被注意耳朵中的特定性别适应声音在测试声音中都会引发相当的后效应。因此，在被注意的耳朵中，即使声音性别与手头任务无关，也会对其进行处理，这表明性别与语言信息一起会被自动处理。总体而言，声音性别适应需要空间选择性注意，而非维度选择性注意。
