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The human voice is a complex acoustic signal that conveys talker identity via individual differences in numerous features, including vocal source acoustics, vocal tract resonances, and dynamic articulations during speech. It remains poorly understood how differences in these features contribute to perceptual dissimilarity of voices and, moreover, whether linguistic differences between listeners and talkers interact during perceptual judgments of voices. Here, native English- and Mandarin-speaking listeners rated the perceptual dissimilarity of voices speaking English or Mandarin from either forward or time-reversed speech. The language spoken by talkers, but not listeners, principally influenced perceptual judgments of voices. Perceptual dissimilarity judgments of voices were always highly correlated between listener groups and forward/time-reversed speech. Representational similarity analyses that explored how acoustic features (fundamental frequency mean and variation, jitter, harmonics-to-noise ratio, speech rate, and formant dispersion) contributed to listeners' perceptual dissimilarity judgments, including how talker- and listener-language affected these relationships, found the largest effects relating to voice pitch. Overall, these data suggest that, while linguistic factors may influence perceptual judgments of voices, the magnitude of such effects tends to be very small. Perceptual judgments of voices by listeners of different native language backgrounds tend to be more alike than different.

Listeners demonstrate reliable perceptual biases favoring voices speaking their native language versus those speaking a foreign language. This “language-familiarity effect” for voice processing has been found even for perceptual similarity judgments: Voices speaking listeners’ native language sound less alike, even when those recordings have been rendered incomprehensible via time-reversal. Here, we sought to replicate and extend this finding of linguistic effects on voice similarity. Native English- and Mandarin-speaking listeners (both N = 40) rated the perceptual similarity of voices speaking English or Mandarin (both N = 20) for either time-reversed or forward speech. Both listener groups tended to find Mandarin-speaking voices more dissimilar, but this effect was reduced for English-speaking listeners, especially for forward speech. Perceptual similarity judgments of voices were always highly correlated between listener groups and between forward/time-reversed speech. Acoustic measurements (voice fun...

Perceiving speech under informational masking requires listeners to distinguish and attend to one talker from among competing talkers. However, it is unknown how well listeners are even able to identify a target talker in the presence of noise, much less how this ability is affected by factors such as noise type, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and speech content. In a two-day training paradigm, young adults with normal hearing learned to identify five talkers by the sound of their voice in quiet. We then tested talker identification accuracy during masking by speech-shaped noise, multi-talker babble, and a single, unfamiliar competing talker. Test stimuli contained both trained and novel sentences and were presented at three different SNRs. Talker identification was highest in quiet and fell as a function of SNR for all noise types. The change in accuracy as a function of SNR was greatest for multi-talker babble. Across all noise types and SNRs, talkers were identified more accurately from trained sentences...

Repeated exposure to disparity between the motor plan and auditory feedback during speech production results in a proportionate change in the motor system’s response called auditory-motor adaptation. Artificially raising F1 in auditory feedback results in a concomitant decrease in F1 during speech production. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can be used to alter neuronal excitability in focal areas of the brain. The present experiment explored the effect of noninvasive brain stimulation applied to the speech premotor cortex on the timing and magnitude of adaptation responses to artificially raised F1 in auditory feedback. Participants (N = 18) completed a speaking task in which they read target words aloud. Participants' speech was processed to raise F1 by 30% and played back to them over headphones in real time. A within-subjects design compared acoustics of participants’ speech while receiving anodal (active) tDCS stimulation versus sham (control) stimulation. Participants' speech showed a...

Listeners identify talkers more accurately when they are familiar with both the sounds and words of the language being spoken. It is unknown whether lexical information alone can facilitate talker identification in the absence of familiar phonology. To dissociate the roles of familiar words and phonology, we developed Mandarin-English “hybrid” sentences, spoken in Mandarin, which can be convincingly coerced to sound like English when presented with corresponding subtitles (e.g., “wei4 gou3 chi1 kao3 li2 zhi1” becomes “we go to college”). Across two experiments, listeners learned to identify talkers in three conditions: listeners' native language (English), an unfamiliar, foreign language (Mandarin), and a foreign language paired with subtitles that primed native language lexical access (subtitled Mandarin). In Experiment 1 listeners underwent a single session of talker identity training; in Experiment 2 listeners completed three days of training. Talkers in a foreign language were identified no better whe...