Voice-specificity effects in recognition memory were investigated using both behavioral data and pupillometry. Volunteers initially heard spoken words and nonwords in two voices; they later provided confidence-based old/new classifications to items presented in their original voices, changed (but familiar) voices, or entirely new voices. Recognition was more accurate for old-voice items, replic...

THE AIMS OF OUR STUDY WERE (1) to determine if the acoustical parameters used by normal subjects to discriminate between different speakers vary when comparisons are made between pairs of two of the same or different vowels, and if they are different for male and female voices; (2) to ask whether individual voices can reasonably be represented as points in a low-dimensional perceptual space suc...

BACKGROUND Auditory hallucinations often influence schizophrenia patients in many aspects. In order to develop effective behavioral interventions for overcoming enduring auditory hallucinations, it is necessary to understand how the annoying symptom affects the daily lives of the patients. This study evaluated the effect of hearing unusual voices on performing the activities of daily life in sc...

BACKGROUND Cognitive models suggest that distress associated with auditory hallucinations is best understood in terms of beliefs about voices. What is less clear is what factors govern such beliefs. This study aimed to explore the way in which traumatic life events contribute towards beliefs about voices and any associated distress. METHOD The difference in the nature and prevalence of trauma...

Most previous studies of vocal attractiveness have focused on preferences for physical characteristics of voices such as pitch. Here we examine the content of vocalizations in interaction with such physical traits, finding that vocal cues of social interest modulate the strength of men's preferences for raised pitch in women's voices. Men showed stronger preferences for raised pitch when judgin...

This paper reports an evaluation of Irish synthetic voices in the context of a virtual reality CALL application. In addition to eliciting subjects’ ratings of the synthetic voices, the evaluation focusses particularly on (1) the extent to which prior attitudes to synthetic voices affected users' satisfaction ratings and (2) the extent to which reactions to the synthetic voices were influenced b...

Ego-documents let us hear the voices of those who have been little heard in historiography. Such documents, especially when narrative nature, provide insight into historical events and periods by illustrating how individuals—in correspondence with their own (in)actions, (in)decisions, (mis)convictions as well emotions, fears, aspirations, frustrations—experienced perceived these phenomena from ...

Appropriate processing of human voices with different threat-related emotions is of evolutionarily adaptive value for the survival of individuals. Nevertheless, it is still not clear whether the sensitivity to threat-related information is present at birth. Using an odd-ball paradigm, the current study investigated the neural correlates underlying automatic processing of emotional voices of fea...

This paper reports our recent work on extending our previous gender detector, targeted only at distinguishing between adult male and female voices, to encompass children’s voices as well. The classifiers were based on multilayer perceptrons and Gaussian mixture models and used Perceptual Linear Prediction coefficients, plus deltas, and pitch as features. Despite the small amount of training dat...

Pathological voices are particularly difficult to inverse filter and fit with source models, in part, because of source-tract interactions inherent in these voice types. In order to obtain good synthetic copies of these voices, we need to know the practical importance of accurately inverse filtering and modeling individual voice sources. To this end, thirty different voices were synthesized, ea...