Breaking voice identity perception: Expressive voices are more confusable for listeners

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Acoustic Phonetics
• Speech Perception

Background:

• Voice identity perception research often uses controlled speech, not natural variations.
• The impact of vocal expressiveness on voice identity is understudied.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how vocal expressiveness affects voice identity perception.
• To compare listener performance with familiar and unfamiliar voices.

Main Methods:

• Two voice-sorting tasks using naturally varying speech stimuli from the TV show *Breaking Bad*.
• Listeners organized audio clips based on perceived identity under low and high expressiveness conditions.
• Comparison between listeners familiar and unfamiliar with the show's characters.

Main Results:

• High vocal expressiveness significantly impaired voice identity discrimination for both familiar and unfamiliar listeners.
• Increased misidentifications occurred under high expressiveness, with familiar listeners showing more consistent errors.
• Listener familiarity influenced how expressiveness affected other aspects of voice identity processing.

Conclusions:

• Vocal flexibility, particularly high expressiveness, strongly impacts voice identity perception.
• Acoustic changes due to expressiveness affect all listeners, but familiarity selectively influences processing.
• Stimulus properties and listener characteristics interact complexly in voice identity perception.