Familiar voice recognition: patterns and parameters Part II: Recognition of rate-altered voices

When we hear a voice, we instantly form rich impressions of the person it belongs to – whether we are familiar with this voice or whether we are hearing it for the first time. Despite the rich impressions we can form of both familiar and unfamiliar voices, current models of voice processing primarily focus on familiar voice identity perception only and do not explicitly account for the processing of unfamiliar voices. Where unfamiliar identity processing is described, it tends to be in the context of specific identity perception tasks, such that the extant literature is largely built on a distinction between familiar voice recognition and unfamiliar voice discrimination. We argue that the current focus of the literature is too narrow in its strong emphasis on identity-specific perception, and does not adequately reflect person perception from voices beyond experimental tasks. Here, we propose a broader, unified account of person perception from both familiar and unfamiliar voices. We suggest that listeners routinely perceive all person characteristics from voices via common recognition processes, based on representations – be those of a specific identity, speaker sex, accent, or a perceived personality trait. While explicit discrimination processes may still be used to disambiguate percepts, they are likely to play a smaller role in perception in naturalistic settings. We offer discussions of how this representation-centred person perception from voices may work, in terms of the nature of representations, their specificity and interactions of different kinds of representation.

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Electrophysiological Correlates of Familiar Voice Recognition

10.21437/interspeech.2017-1392 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Julien Plante-Hébert ◽

Victor J. Boucher ◽

Boutheina Jemel

Keyword(s):

Voice Recognition ◽

Familiar Voice

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Ancient of Days The Vocal Pattern as Primordial Big Bang of Communication

The Oxford Handbook of Voice Perception ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198743187.013.2 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 14-36

Author(s):

Diana Van Lancker Sidtis

Keyword(s):

Crucial Role ◽

Voice Recognition ◽

Big Bang ◽

Biological Species ◽

Air Breathing ◽

The Earth ◽

Human Newborn ◽

Pragmatic Communication ◽

Familiar Voice ◽

Psychiatric State

Familiar voice recognition appeared on the earth 250 million years ago with the advent of frogs. Interestingly, air breathing and vocalization coemerged in the amphibian, as they do as first gesture in the human newborn, suggesting that the larynx was designed to serve these two functions with equal commitment. Establishing a repertory of familiar voices plays a crucial role across biological species, enabling identification of family, friend, and foe in the distance and at night. All voices, familiar and unfamiliar, transmit a cornucopia of data about the speaker, a capability which began simply and has flourished prodigiously in the human to include gender, age, size, sexual preference, socioeconomic and geographical background, mood, emotion, linguistic meanings, pragmatic communication, attitude, and psychiatric state. Considering that vocal information draws on an immense range of human behaviour, one can conclude that it takes a whole brain to produce and perceive a voice pattern.

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