title: Multiple levels of linguistic and paralinguistic features contribute to voice recognition.
abstract: Voice or speaker recognition is critical in a wide variety of social contexts. In this study, we investigated the contributions of acoustic, phonological, lexical, and semantic information toward voice recognition. Native English speaking participants were trained to recognize five speakers in five conditions: non-speech, Mandarin, German, pseudo-English, and English. We showed that voice recognition significantly improved as more information became available, from purely acoustic features in non-speech to additional phonological information varying in familiarity. Moreover, we found that the recognition performance is transferable between training and testing in phonologically familiar conditions (German, pseudo-English, and English), but not in unfamiliar (Mandarin) or non-speech conditions. These results provide evidence suggesting that bottom-up acoustic analysis and top-down influence from phonological processing collaboratively govern voice recognition.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, New York University.
authors.forename: Jean Mary
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Zarate
authors.affiliation: 1] Department of Psychology, New York University. [2] New York University Shanghai. [3] NYU-ECNU Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science at NYU Shanghai.
authors.forename: Xing
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Tian
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, New York University.
authors.forename: Kevin J P
authors.initials: KJ
authors.lastname: Woods
authors.affiliation: 1] Department of Psychology, New York University. [2] Department of Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute (MPIEA).
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Poeppel
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013060:Speech; D014831:Voice; D055815:Young Adult