The role of phonetic overlap for speaker discrimination

Linguistic information influences processing of speaker information in a multitude of ways, whether this arises from the listener's familiarity with the language or dialect spoken, or existing linguistic relationships between spoken words. Specifically, phonological and semantic relationships between spoken words have been observed to influence a listeners’ ability to discriminate voices. This study aims to develop our understanding of how different kinds of linguistic relationships, namely, phonetic relationships, influence the processing of speaker information. We conducted two experiments, a voice discrimination task and a voice similarity rating task, in which listeners were presented with pairs of speakers producing two words with various degrees of phonetic overlap. On the whole, higher quantities of phonetic overlap corresponded to higher speaker discrimination performance and higher similarity scores; however, the type of the phonetic overlap also mattered. Overlapping vowel segments showed substantial utility, while overlap of the phonological rhyme alone substantially lower performance. Results from this condition suggest that a phonological relationship within the word pair can interfere with otherwise increased quantities of phonetic overlap. These findings highlight the salience of the phonological rhyme in voice processing, as well as the overall impact of phonetic overlap.