The Other Accent Effect in Talker Recognition: Now You See It, Now You Don't

Language-general versus language-specific processes in bilingual voice learning

Language experience confers a benefit to voice learning, a concept described in the literature as the language familiarity effect (LFE). What experiences are necessary for the LFE to be conferred is less clear. We contribute empirically and theoretically to this debate by examining within and across language voice learning with Cantonese-English bilingual voices in a talker-voice association paradigm. Listeners were trained in Cantonese or English and assessed on their abilities to generalize voice learning at test on Cantonese and English utterances. By testing listeners from four language backgrounds - English Monolingual, Cantonese-English Multilingual, Tone Multilingual, and Non-tone Multilingual groups - we assess whether the LFE and group-level differences in voice learning are due to varying abilities (1) in accessing the relative acoustic-phonetic features that distinguish a voice, (2) learning at a given rate, or (3) generalizing learning of talker-voice associations to novel same-language and different-language utterances. The specific four language background groups allow us to investigate the roles of language-specific familiarity, tone language experience, and generic multilingual experience in voice learning. Differences in performance across listener groups shows evidence in support of the LFE and the role of two mechanisms for voice learning: the extraction and association of talker-specific, language-general information that is more robustly generalized across languages, and talker-specific, language-specific information that may be more readily accessible and learnable, but due to its language-specific nature, is less able to be extended to another language.

Who is singing? Voice recognition from spoken versus sung speech

Singing is socially important but constrains voice acoustics, potentially masking certain aspects of vocal identity. Little is known about how well listeners extract talker details from sung speech or identify talkers across the sung and spoken modalities. Here, listeners (n = 149) were trained to recognize sung or spoken voices and then tested on their identification of these voices in both modalities. Learning vocal identities was initially easier through speech than song. At test, cross-modality voice recognition was above chance, but weaker than within-modality recognition. We conclude that talker information is accessible in sung speech, despite acoustic constraints in song.

Talker and accent familiarity yield advantages for voice identity perception: A voice sorting study

In the current study, we examine and compare the effects of talker and accent familiarity in the context of a voice identity sorting task, using naturally varying voice recording samples from the TV show Derry Girls. Voice samples were thus all spoken with a regional accent of UK/Irish English (from [London]derry). We tested four listener groups: Listeners were either familiar or unfamiliar with the TV show (and therefore the talker identities) and were either highly familiar or relatively less familiar with Northern Irish accents. Both talker and accent familiarity significantly improved accuracy of voice identity sorting performance. However, the talker familiarity benefits were overall larger, and more consistent. We discuss the results in light of a possible hierarchy of familiarity effects and argue that our findings may provide additional evidence for interactions of speech and identity processing pathways in voice identity perception. We also identify some key limitations in the current work and provide suggestions for future studies to address these.

Revisiting the talker recognition advantage in bilingual infants

Recent work has shown that exposure to multiple languages affects nonlinguistic processing of speech during infancy. Specifically, Fecher and Johnson found that bilingual 9-month-olds outperformed their monolingual peers in a face-voice matching task in an unfamiliar language [Developmental Science (2019a), 22(4), e12778]. What factors were driving this effect? That is, was this finding truly reflective of a bilingual advantage specific to talker processing, or did the study demonstrate a general cognitive advantage in bilingual infants? Here, we revisited this question by testing bilingual and monolingual 9-month-olds (N = 48) on their ability to associate previously unknown voices with animated cartoon characters. In comparison with earlier work, where infants were presented with characters speaking an unfamiliar language (Spanish), the characters in this study spoke a language familiar to both groups of infants (English). Critically, we found that the monolingual and bilingual infants learned the face-voice pairings equally well when they were tested on the familiar language. We conclude that whereas bilingual infants are skilled at recognizing talkers regardless of the language spoken by the talkers, monolingual infants succeed at talker recognition in a familiar language only. These results begin to clarify the underlying nature of the talker recognition benefit previously reported for bilingual infants.