A familiar voice in the lab

Previous experience with a voice can help listeners understand speech when a competing talker is present. Using the Coordinate-Response Measure (CRM) task (Bolia, 2000), Johnsrude et al. (2013) demonstrated that speech is more intelligible when either the target or competing (masking) talker is a long-term spouse than when both talkers are unfamiliar (termed ‘familiar-target’ and ‘familiar-masker’ benefits, respectively). To better understand how familiarity improves intelligibility, we measured the familiar-target and familiar-masker benefits in older and younger spouses using a more challenging matrix task, and compared the benefits listeners gain from spouses’ and friends’ voices. On each trial, participants heard two sentences from the Boston University Gerald (Kidd et al., 2008) corpus (“ ”) and reported words from the sentence beginning with a target name word. A familiar-masker benefit was not observed, but all groups showed a robust familiar-target benefit and its magnitude did not differ between spouses and friends. The familiar-target benefit was not influenced by relationship length (in the range of 0.5–52 years). Together, these results suggest that the familiar-target benefit can develop from various types of relationships and that it reaches a ceiling within several months of meeting a new friend or partner.

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Intelligibility benefit for familiar voices does not depend on better discrimination of fundamental frequency or vocal tract length

10.31234/osf.io/y6gnh ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Emma Holmes ◽

Ingrid Johnsrude

Keyword(s):

Fundamental Frequency ◽

Pulse Rate ◽

Vocal Tract ◽

Tract Length ◽

Familiar Voice ◽

The Difference ◽

Voice Discrimination

Speech is more intelligible when it is spoken by familiar than unfamiliar people. Two cues to voice identity are glottal pulse rate (GPR) and vocal tract length (VTL): perhaps these features are more accurately represented for familiar voices in a listener’s brain. If so, listeners should be able to discriminate smaller manipulations to perceptual correlates of these vocal parameters for familiar than unfamiliar voices. We recruited pairs of friends who had known each other for 0.5–22.5 years. We measured thresholds for discriminating pitch (correlate of GPR) and formant spacing (correlate of VTL; ‘VTL-timbre’) for voices that were familiar (friends) and unfamiliar (friends of other participants). When a competing talker was present, speech was substantially more intelligible when it was spoken in a familiar voice. Discrimination thresholds were not systematically smaller for familiar compared to unfamiliar talkers. Although, participants detected smaller deviations to VTL-timbre than pitch uniquely for familiar talkers, suggesting a different balance of characteristics contribute to discrimination of familiar and unfamiliar voices. Across participants, we found no relationship between the size of the intelligibility benefit for a familiar over an unfamiliar voice and the difference in discrimination thresholds for the same voices. Also, the intelligibility benefit was not affected by the acoustic manipulations we imposed on voices to assess discrimination thresholds. Overall, these results provide no evidence that two important cues to voice identity—pitch and VTL-timbre—are more accurately represented when voices are familiar, or are necessarily responsible for the large intelligibility benefit derived from familiar voices.

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