Electrophysiological correlates of the perception of speaker gender and identity
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1
DFG Research Unit Person Perception, Germany
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2
Friedrich Schiller University, Germany
Although the voice is an important cue to speaker gender and identity, voice identification and its neural correlates have received relatively little scientific attention. We present evidence on the role various acoustic cues in the recognition of speaker gender and identity. We also use adaptation to demonstrate contrastive effects in voice gender perception, and in the identification of personally familiar voices. In experiments using different whole-sentence utterances as adaptors and test stimuli, prolonged exposure to speaker A´s voice strongly biased the perception of identity-ambiguous voice morphs between speakers A and B towards speaker B (and vice versa). Intriguingly, we observed significant - albeit smaller - bias effects to voice identification, when adaptors were videos of speakers’ silently articulating faces. Moreover, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neural representation and the time course of vocal identity processing, using short VCV utterances. Here, contrastive voice identity aftereffects were much more pronounced when the same syllable, rather than a different syllable, was used as adaptor. Identity adaptation induced amplitude reductions of the frontocentral N1-P2 complex and a prominent reduction of a parietal P3 component, for test voices preceded by identity-corresponding adaptors. Importantly, only the P3 modulation remained clear for across-syllable combinations of adaptor and test stimuli. Our results suggest that voice identity is contrastively processed by specialised neurons in auditory cortex within ~250 ms after stimulus onset, with identity processing becoming less dependent on speech content after ~300 ms. Funding: Supported by DFG Grant Ref Schw 511/10-1.
Keywords:
EEG,
Perception
Conference:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Sessions: Neurophysiology of Sensation and Perception
Citation:
Schweinberger
S,
Skuk
VG,
Kovács
G and
Zäske
R
(2011). Electrophysiological correlates of the perception of speaker gender and identity.
Conference Abstract:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00334
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Received:
23 Nov 2011;
Published Online:
28 Nov 2011.
*
Correspondence:
Prof. Stefan Schweinberger, DFG Research Unit Person Perception, Thuringia, Germany, stefan.schweinberger@uni-jena.de