Fluidity in the perception of auditory speech: Cross-modal recalibration of voice gender and vowel identity by a talking face

Merel Burgering*, Thijs van Laarhoven, Martijn Baart, Jean Vroomen*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)
128 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Humans quickly adapt to variations in the speech signal. Adaptation may surface as recalibration, a learning effect driven by error-minimisation between a visual face and an ambiguous auditory speech signal, or as selective adaptation, a contrastive aftereffect driven by the acoustic clarity of the sound. Here, we examined whether these aftereffects occur for vowel identity and voice gender. Participants were exposed to male, female, or androgynous tokens of speakers pronouncing /e/, /ø/, (embedded in words with a consonant-vowel-consonant structure), or an ambiguous vowel halfway between /e/ and /ø/ dubbed onto the video of a male or female speaker pronouncing /e/ or /ø/. For both voice gender and vowel identity, we found assimilative aftereffects after exposure to auditory ambiguous adapter sounds, and contrastive aftereffects after exposure to auditory clear adapter sounds. This demonstrates that similar principles for adaptation in these dimensions are at play.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)957-967
JournalThe Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Volume 73
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Keywords

  • Audiovisual integration
  • EAR
  • ELECTROPHYSIOLOGICAL EVIDENCE
  • IDENTIFICATION
  • INFORMATION
  • LIPREAD SPEECH
  • PHONETIC RECALIBRATION
  • RECOGNITION
  • SELECTIVE ADAPTATION
  • SEX-DIFFERENCES
  • SPEAKER
  • gender
  • recalibration
  • selective adaptation
  • vowel

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