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In the current project, we will run behavioural studies to examine the contributions of personal taste vs shared taste on person perception from voices. When hearing a voice, listeners can very quickly form an impression of what the person they are talking to might be like: Do we think they are trustworthy, likeable, aggressive? The voice literature also shows - and often even stresses - that these impressions are shared across listeners (e.g., McAleer et al., 2014; Mileva & Lavan, 2023, Lavan, 2023; Rezlescu et al., 2015; Marholz et al., 2018): That is, listeners are generally viewed as agreeing with one another on whether a person sounds, for example, trustworthy or not. High inter-rater agreement, quantified via Cronbach's alpha or the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC2k), is usually cited as evidence for the shared nature of impressions. However, while the statement that impressions are at least to some degree shared across listeners is true, it is perhaps an oversimplification of how trait impressions are formed. Work from the face perception literature (Hönekopp, 2006) confirms that there is indeed more to impressions: This works showsthat, while agreement between raters can explain some of the variance in attractiveness impressions ("shared taste", as partially captured by Cronbach's alpha or the ICC(2,k)), additional variance can be explained by perceivers' 'personal taste' that is crucially not shared. Further evidence from the face perception literature shows that these findings are not only true for attractiveness impressions but that impressions of a large number of different traits can be characteristics by contributions of shared vs personal taste. Indeed, personal taste that is not shared across perceivers can play a role that is as substantial as the role of shared taste in trait perception from faces (Hehmann et al., 2017, Sutherland et al., 2020). This idea of shared vs personal taste influencing person perception from voices has so far been largely neglected in the literature both from a conceptual/theoretical as well as from and statistical point of view in favour of looking at shared taste only. Building on findings from the face perception literature, we will here examine and characterise whether and how shared vs personal taste relate to one another during person perception from voices.

Acquiring non-native speech contrasts can be difficult. A seminal study by Logan, Lively and Pisoni (1991) established the effectiveness of phonetic training for improving non-native speech perception: Japanese learners of English were trained to perceive /r/-/l/ using minimal pairs over 15 training sessions. A pre/post-test design established learning and generalisation. In a follow up study, Lively, Logan and Pisoni (1993) presented further evidence which suggested that talker variability in training stimuli was crucial in leading to greater generalisation. These findings have been very influential and “high variability phonetic training” is now a standard methodology in the field. However, while the general benefit of phonetic training is well replicated, the evidence for an advantage of high over lower variability training remains mixed. We propose a large-scale replication of the original studies using updated statistical analyses to confirm whether learners generalise more after phonetic training using multiple talkers over a single talker.

Stimuli for the pilots and experiments are deposited here