A language familiarity effect for talker identification in forward but not time-reversed speech

2015 ◽  
Vol 137 (4) ◽  
pp. 2415-2415
Author(s):  
Sara C. Dougherty ◽  
Deirdre E. Mclaughlin ◽  
Tyler K. Perrachione
Keyword(s):  
Familiarity Effect ◽  
Language Familiarity ◽  
Talker Identification

Recognizing Speakers Across Languages

2018 ◽  
pp. 514-538
Author(s):  
Tyler K. Perrachione
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Speech Processing ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Linguistic Competence ◽  
Familiarity Effect ◽  
Neural Models ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Language Familiarity ◽  
Talker Identification ◽  
Gain Access

Listeners identify voices more accurately in their native language than an unknown, foreign language, in a phenomenon known as the language-familiarity effect in talker identification. This effect has been reliably observed for a wide range of different language pairings and using a variety of different methodologies, including voice line-ups, talker-identification training, and talker discrimination. What do listeners know about their native language that helps them recognize voices more accurately? Do listeners gain access to this knowledge when they learn a second language? Is linguistic competence necessary, or can mere exposure to a foreign language help listeners identify voices more accurately? This chapter reviews the more than three decades of research on the language-familiarity effect in talker identification, with an emphasis on how attention to this phenomenon can inform not only better psychological and neural models of memory for voices, but also better models of speech processing.

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

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (6) ◽  
pp. 1117-1146 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIANNE SENIOR ◽  
JOBIE HUI ◽  
MOLLY BABEL
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Social Expectations ◽  
Potential Mechanism ◽  
Familiarity Effect ◽  
Linguistic Processing ◽  
Basic Premise ◽  
Language Familiarity ◽  
Phonetic Cues ◽  
Accented English

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.

scholarly journals A language-familiarity effect for speaker discrimination without comprehension

2014 ◽  
Vol 111 (38) ◽  
pp. 13795-13798 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Fleming ◽  
B. L. Giordano ◽  
R. Caldara ◽  
P. Belin
Keyword(s):  
Familiarity Effect ◽  
Language Familiarity ◽  
Speaker Discrimination

Talker Processing in Mandarin-Speaking Congenital Amusics

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (5) ◽  
pp. 1361-1375
Author(s):  
Jing Shao ◽  
Lan Wang ◽  
Caicai Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Phonological Processing ◽  
Identification Accuracy ◽  
Musical Ability ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Phonological Representations ◽  
Congenital Amusia ◽  
Language Familiarity ◽  
Native Speech ◽  
Behavioral Evidence ◽  
Talker Identification

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

scholarly journals A language-familiarity effect on the recognition of computer-transformed vocal emotional cues

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomoya Nakai ◽  
Laura Rachman ◽  
Pablo Arias ◽  
Kazuo Okanoya ◽  
Jean-Julien Aucouturier
Keyword(s):  
Native Language ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Familiarity Effect ◽  
Emotional Cues ◽  
Voice Identification ◽  
Language Familiarity ◽  
Socially Relevant ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Stimulus Degradation ◽  
Rule Out

AbstractPeople are more accurate in voice identification and emotion recognition in their native language than in other languages, a phenomenon known as the language familiarity effect (LFE). Previous work on cross-cultural inferences of emotional prosody has left it difficult to determine whether these native-language advantages arise from a true enhancement of the auditory capacity to extract socially relevant cues in familiar speech signals or, more simply, from cultural differences in how these emotions are expressed. In order to rule out such production differences, this work employed algorithmic voice transformations to create pairs of stimuli in the French and Japanese language which differed by exactly the same amount of prosodic expression. Even though the cues were strictly identical in both languages, they were better recognized when participants processed them in their native language. This advantage persisted in three types of stimulus degradation (jabberwocky, shuffled and reversed sentences). These results provide univocal evidence that production differences are not the sole drivers of LFEs in cross-cultural emotion perception, and suggest that it is the listeners’ lack of familiarity with the individual speech sounds of the other language, and not e.g. with their syntax or semantics, which impairs their processing of higher-level emotional cues.

scholarly journals Language-familiarity effect on voice recognition by blind listeners

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (5) ◽  
pp. 055201
Author(s):  
Linjun Zhang ◽  
Yu Li ◽  
Hong Zhou ◽  
Yang Zhang ◽  
Hua Shu
Keyword(s):  
Voice Recognition ◽  
Familiarity Effect ◽  
Language Familiarity

scholarly journals Abstraction and the (Misnamed) Language Familiarity Effect

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 633-645 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth K. Johnson ◽  
Laurence Bruggeman ◽  
Anne Cutler
Keyword(s):  
Familiarity Effect ◽  
Language Familiarity
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