Using systematic synthetic voice differences to probe the perception of mixed-talker vowels.
Santiago Barreda, Terrance M. Nearey · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2010
Many experiments have reported a perceptual advantage for vowels presented in blocked versus mixed speaker conditions. Nusbaum and colleagues [Nusbaum and Morin (1992); Magnuson and Nusbaum (2007)] found that the size of this advantage varies with aspects of the similarity of the voices involved. The largest performance difference occurs when voices are of intermediate similarity (e.g, two similar sounding female voices with incongruent vowel spaces). Difference are smaller when voices are either very similar or very different. The current study will explore some potentially relevant dimensions of similarity using vowels from a set of synthetic virtual talkers whose voice characteristics differ in formant ranges, f0, and/or source characteristics. Perceptual accuracy and response times will be collected using a speeded monitoring task in which participants are asked to respond as soon as they hear a specific target vowel. Results will be evaluated in light of current theories of vowel normalization and speaker adaptation.