Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2022 Mar;75(3):450-460. doi: 10.1177/17470218211030798. Epub 2021 Jul 9.
The way we process language is influenced by our experience. We are more likely to attend to features that proved to be useful in the past. Importantly, the size of individuals' social network can influence their experience, and consequently, how they process language. In the case of voice recognition, having a larger social network might provide more variable input and thus enhance the ability to recognise new voices. On the other hand, learning to recognise voices is more demanding and less beneficial for people with a larger social network as they have more speakers to learn yet spend less time with each. This paper tests whether social network size influences voice recognition, and if so, in which direction. Native Dutch speakers listed their social network and performed a voice recognition task. Results showed that people with larger social networks were at learning to recognise voices. Experiment 2 replicated the results with a British sample and English stimuli. Experiment 3 showed that the effect does not generalise to voice recognition in an unfamiliar language suggesting that social network size influences attention to the linguistic rather than non-linguistic markers that differentiate speakers. The studies thus show that our social network size influences our inclination to learn speaker-specific patterns in our environment, and consequently, the development of skills that rely on such learned patterns, such as voice recognition.
我们处理语言的方式受到我们经验的影响。我们更有可能关注过去证明有用的特征。重要的是，个体的社交网络规模可以影响他们的经验，进而影响他们处理语言的方式。在语音识别的情况下，拥有更大的社交网络可能会提供更多变化的输入，从而提高识别新声音的能力。另一方面，对于社交网络较大的人来说，学习识别声音的要求更高，收益更小，因为他们需要学习的说话者更多，但与每个说话者相处的时间更少。本文测试了社交网络规模是否会影响语音识别，如果会，影响的方向如何。荷兰母语者列出了他们的社交网络，并完成了一项语音识别任务。结果表明，社交网络较大的人在学习识别声音方面存在困难。实验 2 用英国样本和英语刺激物重复了这一结果。实验 3 表明，这种效应不会推广到不熟悉语言的语音识别，这表明社交网络规模影响对语言而非区分说话者的非语言标记的注意力。因此，这些研究表明，我们的社交网络规模影响我们在环境中学习说话者特定模式的倾向，从而影响依赖于这些习得模式的技能的发展，例如语音识别。
