Is the brain capable of distinguishing a voice from the specific sounds it utters?
Is the brain capable of distinguishing a voice from the specific sounds it utters? In an attempt to answer this question, researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, – in collaboration with the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands – devised pseudo-words (words without meaning) spoken by three voices with different pitches. Their aim? To observe how the brain processes this information when it focuses either on the voice or on speech sounds (i.e. phonemes). The scientists discovered that the auditory cortex amplifies different aspects of the sounds, depending on what task is being performed. Voice-specific information is prioritised for voice differentiation, while phoneme-specific information is important for the differentiation of speech sounds. The results, which are published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, shed light on the cerebral mechanisms involved in speech processing.
Speech has two distinguishing characteristics: the voice of the speaker and the linguistic content itself, including speech sounds. Does the brain process these two types of information in the same way? “We created 120 pseudo-words that comply with the phonology of the French language but that make no sense, to make sure that semantic processing would not interfere with the pure perception of the phonemes,” explains Narly Golestani, professor in the Psychology Section at UNIGE’s Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (FPSE). These pseudo-words all contained phonemes such as /p/, /t/ or /k/, as in /preperibion/, /gabratade/ and /ecalimacre/.
The UNIGE team recorded the voice of a female phonetician articulating the pseudo-words, which they then converted into different, lower to higher pitched voices. “To make the differentiation of the voices as difficult as the differentiation of the speech sounds, we created the percept of three different voices from the recorded stimuli, rather than recording three actual different people,” continues Sanne Rutten, researcher at the Psychology Section of the FPSE of the UNIGE.
Read more at University of Geneva
