Effects of nasality and utterance length on the recognition of familiar speakers

The present study examines the effects of nasality and utterance length on memory of familiar speakers using the technique of voice line-ups. With this technique, presented speakers have similar speech F0, dialect, and age range, and they utter the same material. Sets of voice line-ups were elaborated each containing 10 male voices (1 target “familiar” voice and 9 “filler” voices). In each set, speakers produced given utterances of four different lengths, with varying numbers of nasal sounds. Participants (n = 44) were selected on the basis of their familiarity with the target voice. They were asked to identify the familiar voice within line-ups. The results show that both utterance length and nasality positively influence voice recognition but these effects only begin after hearing four or more syllables. This suggests that speaker recognition requires a few syllables and may not operate as quickly as processes of visual recognition.