The native language benefit for voice recognition is not contingent on lexical access
Nicholas R. Monto, Rachel M. Theodore, Adriel John Orena, Linda Polka · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2016
Listeners show heightened talker recognition for native compared to nonnative speech, formalized as the language familiarity effect (LFE) for voice recognition. Some findings suggest that language comprehension is the locus of the LFE, while others implicate expertise with the linguistic sound structure. These hypotheses yield different predictions for the LFE with time-reversed speech, a manipulation that precludes lexical access but preserves some indexical and phonetic properties. Research to date shows discrepant results for the LFE with this impoverished signal. Here we reconcile this discrepancy by examining how the amount of exposure to talkers’ voices influences the LFE for time-reversed speech. Three experiments were conducted. In all, two groups of English monolinguals were trained and then tested on the identification of four English talkers and four French talkers; one group heard natural speech and the other group heard time-reversed speech. Across the experiments, we manipulated exposure to the voices in terms of number of training trials and duration of the talkers’ sentences. A robust LFE emerged in all cases, though the magnitude was attenuated as the amount of exposure decreased. These results are consistent with the account that the LFE for talker identification is linked to the sound structure of language.