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. 2024 May 23:15:1352692.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1352692. eCollection 2024.

The mechanism of phonetic information in voice identity discrimination: a comparative study based on sighted and blind people

Lili Ming  1   2 , Libo Geng  1   2 , Xinyu Zhao  1   2 , Yichan Wang  1   2 , Na Hu  3 , Yiming Yang  1   2 , Xueping Hu  4   5
Affiliations

The mechanism of phonetic information in voice identity discrimination: a comparative study based on sighted and blind people

Lili Ming et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine whether phonetic information functions and how phonetic information affects voice identity processing in blind people.

Method: To address the first inquiry, 25 normal sighted participants and 30 blind participants discriminated voice identity, when listening forward speech and backward speech from their own native language and another unfamiliar language. To address the second inquiry, combining articulatory suppression paradigm, 26 normal sighted participants and 26 blind participants discriminated voice identity, when listening forward speech from their own native language and another unfamiliar language.

Results: In Experiment 1, not only in the voice identity discrimination task with forward speech, but also in the discrimination task with backward speech, both the sighted and blind groups showed the superiority of the native language. This finding supports the view that backward speech still retains some phonetic information, and indicates that phonetic information can affect voice identity processing in sighted and blind people. In addition, only the superiority of the native language of sighted people was regulated by the speech manner, which is related to articulatory rehearsal. In Experiment 2, only the superiority of the native language of sighted people was regulated by articulatory suppression. This indicates that phonetic information may act in different ways on voice identity processing in sighted and blind people.

Conclusion: The heightened dependence on voice source information in blind people appears not to undermine the function of phonetic information, but it appears to change the functional mechanism of phonetic information. These findings suggest that the present phonetic familiarity model needs to be improved with respect to the mechanism of phonetic information.

Keywords: blind people; language familiarity effect; phonological short-term memory; sighted people; voice identity discrimination.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Flow chart of voice identity discrimination task in Experiment 1. Regarding the label of condition, Native and Nonnative represent native language and nonnative language respectively, FW and BW represent forward speech and backward speech, respectively.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Interaction effect of language and play manner in the sighted and blind groups. The picture on the left shows the interaction effect between language and play manner in the sighted group, and the picture on the right shows the interaction effect between language and play manner in the blind group. Regarding the label of condition, Native and Nonnative represent native language and nonnative language respectively, FW and BW represent forward speech and backward speech, respectively, *p ≤ 0.05, **p ≤ 0.01, ***p ≤ 0.001.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Flow chart of voice identity discrimination task in Experiment 2. Regarding the label of condition, Native and Nonnative represent native language and nonnative language respectively, FW and BW represent forward speech and backward speech respectively, AS and AC represent articulatory suppression and articulatory control, respectively.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Interaction effect of language and articulatory rehearsal in the sighted and blind groups. The picture on the left shows the interaction effect between language and articulatory rehearsal in the sighted group, and the picture on the right shows the interaction effect between language and articulatory rehearsal in the blind group. Regarding the label of condition, Native and Nonnative represent native language and nonnative language respectively, and AS and AC represent articulatory suppression and articulatory control, respectively, *p ≤ 0.05, **p ≤ 0.01, ***p ≤ 0.001.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Phonetic familiarity model based on sighted and blind people. (A) shows the model based on sighted people, and (B) shows the model based on blind people.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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