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Updated: Aug 7, 2026

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
The influence of meaning on the perception of speech sounds
Nina Kazanina1, Colin Phillips, William Idsardi
1Department of Linguistics, University of Ottawa, 401 Arts Hall, 70 Laurier Avenue, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1N 6N5. ninaka@uottawa.ca
Abstract:
As part of knowledge of language, an adult speaker possesses information on which sounds are used in the language and on the distribution of these sounds in a multidimensional acoustic space. However, a speaker must know not only the sound categories of his language but also the functional significance of these categories, in particular, which sound contrasts are relevant for storing words in memory and which sound contrasts are not. Using magnetoencephalographic brain recordings with speakers of Russian and Korean, we demonstrate that a speaker's perceptual space, as reflected in early auditory brain responses, is shaped not only by bottom-up analysis of the distribution of sounds in his language but also by more abstract analysis of the functional significance of those sounds.
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