The Center
For
Cognitive Science
Cognitive Science Colloquium
Wednesday, 13 April 2011, 2:00 P.M.
280 Park Hall
Robert E. Remez
Department of Psychology, Barnard College
I Would Know that Voice Anywhere!
The Role of Phonetic Sensitivity in the Perceptual
Identification of Individual Talkers
A listener's ability to identify a familiar talker is often ascribed to sensory samples of the acoustic attributes of vocal
quality. In idealizations of this aspect of speech perception, unique, long-term characteristics of the vocal source of
acquaintances are represented in a gallery in long-term memory, and such characteristics function as standards for
evaluating an unknown signal that challenges the auditory system. The ability to identify a linguistic message
inheres in a different set of acoustic properties, those of finer grain that underlie the perception of consonant and
vowel sequences used to identify spoken words. Neuropsychological findings of a dissociation between aphasia and
phonagnosia suggest a system architecture in which the perception of a linguistic message is independent of the
perception of the identity of the talker who produced it. The plausibility of this conceptualization can be assessed in
light of our studies of individual identification without recourse to auditory impressions of familiar vocal quality.
This evidence shows that phonetic attributes can contribute to the perception and identification of individual talkers.
RECOMMENDED READING:
1.
Remez, Robert E. (2010), "Spoken Expression of Individual Identity and the Listener", in E. Morsella (ed.),
Expressing Oneself/Expressing One's Self: Communication, Cognition, Language, and Identity (New York:
Psychology Press): 167–181.
2.
Remez, Robert E.; Dubowski, Kathryn R.; Broder, Robin S.; Davids, Morgana L.; Grossman, Yael S.;
Moskalenko, Marina; Pardo, Jennifer S.; & Hasbun, Sara Maria (2010), "Auditory-Phonetic Projection and
Lexical Structure in the Recognition of Sine-Wave Words", Technical Report (New York: Barnard College
Speech Perception Laboratory); Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
(in press).