Recognition of famous voices given excerpted vowels, words, and 2-s texts
Karen D. Emmorey, Diana Van Lancker, Jody E. Kreiman · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1983
The ability of 40 subjects to recognize 25 famous male voices was investigated. Samples were tape-recorded and edited on a PDP-11/34 computer. Three different listening tasks were prepared. Subjects indicated whether they recognized voices given six choices: (1) from 2-s samples; (2) from excerpted words (mean duration 481 ms; and (3) from excerpted and concatenated strings of vowels (mean duration 494 ms). The same voices were used in all tasks. Subjects were divided into two groups. For one group, the tasks were presented in the order 2-s texts, words, vowels. For group two, the reverse order was presented. A two-way ANOVA revealed no effect of presentation order. Subjects correctly identified 61% of the voices they knew (ascertained by a questionnaire) given 2-s texts, 40% of the voices given excerpted words, and 34% given vowel strings. Subjects performed significantly better on the 2-s task than on the word or vowels tasks. There was no significant difference between their performance on the word and vowels conditions. These results show that voices can be recognized given limited amounts of voice information. [Work supported by NIH Grant No. 4-443944-31117.]