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Updated: Jul 26, 2025

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
Individual variability in subcortical neural encoding shapes phonetic cue weighting
Jinghua Ou1, Ming Xiang2, Alan C L Yu3
1Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, 1115 E. 58Th Street, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA. jou@uchicago.edu.
Abstract:
Recent studies have revealed great individual variability in cue weighting, and such variation is shown to be systematic across individuals and linked to differences in some general cognitive mechanism. The present study investigated the role of subcortical encoding as a source of individual variability in cue weighting by focusing on English listeners' frequency following responses to the tense/lax English vowel contrast varying in spectral and durational cues. Listeners differed in early auditory encoding with some encoding the spectral cue more veridically than the durational one, while others exhibited the reverse pattern. These differences in cue encoding further correlate with behavioral variability in cue weighting, suggesting that specificity in cue encoding across individuals modulates how cues are weighted in downstream processes.
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