How many voices did you hear? Natural variability disrupts identity perception from unfamiliar voices.

ABSTRACT: Our voices sound different depending on the context (laughing vs. talking to a child vs. giving a speech), making within-person variability an inherent feature of human voices. When perceiving speaker identities, listeners therefore need to not only 'tell people apart' (perceiving exemplars from two different speakers as separate identities) but also 'tell people together' (perceiving different exemplars from the same speaker as a single identity). In the current study, we investigated how such natural within-person variability affects voice identity perception. Using voices from a popular TV show, listeners, who were either familiar or unfamiliar with this show, sorted naturally varying voice clips from two speakers into clusters to represent perceived identities. Across three independent

SUBMITTER: Lavan N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6767376 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature