Perceiving the sex and identity of a talker without natural vocal timbre

Abstract

The personal attributes of a talker perceived via acoustic properties of speech are commonly considered to be an extralinguistic message of an utterance. Accordingly, accounts of the perception of talker attributes have emphasized a causal role of aspects of the fundamental frequency and coarse-grain acoustic spectra distinct from the detailed acoustic correlates of phonemes. In testing this view, in four experiments, we estimated the ability of listeners to ascertain the sex or the identity of 5 male and 5 female talkers from sinusoidal replicas of natural utterances, which lack fundamental frequency and natural vocal spectra. Given such radically reduced signals, listeners appeared to identify a talker's sex according to the central spectral tendencies of the sinusoidal constituents. Under acoustic conditions that prevented listeners from determining the sex of a talker, individual identification from sinewave signals was often successful. These results reveal that the perception of a talker's sex and identity are not contingent and that fine-grain aspects of a talker's phonetic production can elicit individual identification under conditions that block the perception of voice quality.