Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research Vol.54 1240-1245 August 2011. doi:10.1044/1092-4388(2010/10-0168)
© American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
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Research Note

Perceptual Adaptation of Voice Gender Discrimination With Spectrally Shifted Vowels

Tianhao Lia
Qian-Jie Fua
a House Ear Institute, Los Angeles, CA

Correspondence to Tianhao Li: tianhaol{at}gmail.com

Purpose: To determine whether perceptual adaptation improves voice gender discrimination of spectrally shifted vowels and, if so, which acoustic cues contribute to the improvement.

Method: Voice gender discrimination was measured for 10 normal-hearing subjects, during 5 days of adaptation to spectrally shifted vowels, produced by processing the speech of 5 male and 5 female talkers with 16-channel sine-wave vocoders. The subjects were randomly divided into 2 groups; one subjected to 50-Hz, and the other to 200-Hz, temporal envelope cutoff frequencies. No preview or feedback was provided.

Results: There was significant adaptation in voice gender discrimination with the 200-Hz cutoff frequency, but significant improvement was observed only for 3 female talkers with F0 > 180 Hz and 3 male talkers with F0 < 170 Hz. There was no significant adaptation with the 50-Hz cutoff frequency.

Conclusions: Temporal envelope cues are important for voice gender discrimination under spectral shift conditions with perceptual adaptation, but spectral shift may limit the exclusive use of spectral information and/or the use of formant structure on voice gender discrimination. The results have implications for cochlear implant users and for understanding voice gender discrimination.

KEY WORDS: perceptual adaptation, voice gender discrimination, spectrally shifted speech


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