Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom; Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychology, University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany; Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montréal, Canada; Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McGill University, Montréal, Canada.
Cognition. 2021 Oct;215:104780. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104780. Epub 2021 Jul 20.
Familiar and unfamiliar voice perception are often understood as being distinct from each other. For identity perception, theoretical work has proposed that listeners use acoustic information in different ways to perceive identity from familiar and unfamiliar voices: Unfamiliar voices are thought to be processed based on close comparisons of acoustic properties, while familiar voices are processed based on diagnostic acoustic features that activate a stored person-specific representation of that voice. To date no empirical study has directly examined whether and how familiar and unfamiliar listeners differ in their use of acoustic information for identity perception. Here, we tested this theoretical claim by linking listeners' judgements in voice identity tasks to complex acoustic representation - spectral similarity of the heard voice recordings. Participants (N = 177) who were either familiar or unfamiliar with a set of voices completed an identity discrimination task (Experiment 1) or an identity sorting task (Experiment 2). In both experiments, identity judgements for familiar and unfamiliar voices were guided by spectral similarity: Pairs of recordings with greater acoustic similarity were more likely to be perceived as belonging to the same voice identity. However, while there were no differences in how familiar and unfamiliar listeners used acoustic information for identity discrimination, differences were apparent for identity sorting. Our study therefore challenges proposals that view familiar and unfamiliar voice perception as being at all times distinct. Instead, our data suggest a critical role of the listening situation in which familiar and unfamiliar voices are evaluated, thus characterising voice identity perception as a highly dynamic process in which listeners opportunistically make use of any kind of information they can access.
熟悉和不熟悉的语音感知通常被理解为彼此不同。对于身份感知，理论工作提出，听众使用不同的声学信息来从熟悉和不熟悉的声音中感知身份：不熟悉的声音被认为是基于声学属性的紧密比较来处理的，而熟悉的声音则是基于诊断性的声学特征来处理的，这些特征激活了对该声音的特定于个人的存储表示。迄今为止，没有实证研究直接检查熟悉和不熟悉的听众在使用声学信息进行身份感知方面是否存在差异以及差异如何。在这里，我们通过将听众在语音身份任务中的判断与复杂的声学表示（所听到的语音记录的频谱相似性）联系起来，检验了这一理论主张。参与者（N=177）要么熟悉一组声音，要么不熟悉一组声音，他们完成了身份辨别任务（实验 1）或身份分类任务（实验 2）。在这两个实验中，熟悉和不熟悉的声音的身份判断都受到频谱相似性的指导：具有更大声学相似性的录音对更有可能被感知为属于同一声音身份。然而，虽然熟悉和不熟悉的听众在身份辨别中使用声学信息的方式没有差异，但在身份分类中却存在差异。因此，我们的研究挑战了将熟悉和不熟悉的语音感知始终视为不同的观点。相反，我们的数据表明，听众所处的倾听情境在评估熟悉和不熟悉的声音时起着关键作用，从而将熟悉和不熟悉的语音感知描述为一个高度动态的过程，在此过程中，听众会利用他们能够获得的任何信息。
