On the perception of similarity among talkers.

A listener who recognizes a talker notices characteristic attributes of the talker's speech despite the novelty of each utterance. Accounts of talker perception have often presumed that consistent aspects of an individual's speech, termed indexical properties, are ascribable to a talker's unique anatomy or consistent vocal posture distinct from acoustic correlates of phonetic contrasts. Accordingly, the perception of a talker is acknowledged to occur independently of the perception of a linguistic message.

Analysis and analogy in the perception of vowels.

In two experiments, we investigated the creation of conceptual analogies to a contrast between vowels. An ordering procedure was used to determine the reliability of simple sensory and abstract analogies to vowel contrasts composed by naive volunteers. The results indicate that test subjects compose stable and consistent analogies to a meaningless segmental linguistic contrast, some invoking simple and complex relational properties.

Learning to recognize talkers from natural, sinewave, and reversed speech samples.

In 5 experiments, the authors investigated how listeners learn to recognize unfamiliar talkers and how experience with specific utterances generalizes to novel instances. Listeners were trained over several days to identify 10 talkers from natural, sinewave, or reversed speech sentences. The sinewave signals preserved phonetic and some suprasegmental properties while eliminating natural vocal quality.

Multimodal perceptual organization of speech: Evidence from tone analogs of spoken utterances.

Theoretical and practical motives alike have prompted recent investigations of multimodal speech perception. Theoretically, multimodal studies have extended the conceptualization of perceptual organization beyond the familiar modality-bound accounts deriving from Gestalt psychology. Practically, such investigations have been driven by a need to understand the proficiency of multimodal speech perception using an electrocochlear prosthesis for hearing.