The initial time Span of auditory processing used for speaker attribution of the speech signal

Research on the temporal organisation of speech perception is focussed mostly on the linguistic categories of the input. What is the role of non-grammatical categories for this processes? What kind of mechanisms integrate both kinds of features within the online process of perception? Individual voice qualities and the position of the sentence within the text were chosen to test the time interval where decisions as to speaker belongingness are made. The results favour a model with a relatively fixed time span within which a familiar voice or a deviation from an inherent context expectancy are detected. Whereas research on the time organisation of speech perception is focused on the processes of phoneme identification or lexical access, few is known about the timing of the auditory processing of so-called extralinguistic factors as, for example, speakers' voice which is known to play an important role in the recognition of speech. A first attempt to procede in this direction was made by Lublinskaja , Sappok 1996. The task of our present work is to investigate the temporal side of processing speech signals when a listener has to ascribe them to some familiar speaker. Being involved in the process of modelling the discourse situation he has to trace a target voice within sequences of sentences spoken by different speakers. Two questions have to be answered: (1) How long is the initial time span subjects need to ascribe sentences to a target voice? 2) What is the nature of this interval: does it depend on the specific features of the acoustic events? Or is it a standard rate of scanning the results of auditory input as represented in memory? Hypotheses on this field have mostly been discussed in connection with phoneme identification (Chistovich 1984, Massarro 1972) or with lexical access (Marslen-Wilson 1985) paying little attention to online processing of speakers´voice characteristics. A set of sentences from the Acoustic Data Base of the Saint-Petersburg University was used as speech material [2]. Two main tests preceded by two preparatory tests (cf. below) were prepared: The first contained a sequence of 28 sentences spoken by two alternating voices (female and male). In the second test 31 sentences where spoken by four speakers: two female and two male. In both tests one of the female voices was chosen to be the familiar voice being the object of training procedures, the other voices being unfamiliar. The familiar voice predominated over …