IDIOLECT

Idiolect

Idiolect

Brief description of the topic

A thorough understanding of speech perception requires examination of factors that generate variability in the speech signal and their potential influences on a listener's processing and production of speech. Listeners faced with speech that often varies due to the state of a talker (e.g., emotion), due to characteristics specific to a talker (e.g., idiolectic information), and, sometimes due to speech signals that contain more systematic variation, such as that caused by a foreign accent. As a result, perceivers should have an incredibly difficult time when it comes to their ability to process and understand speech. Normally, mainstream listeners are typically able to resolve the linguistic content of a given message. Therefore, all issues related to idiolect will be discussed in detail.

Different situations related to the usage of language

Individual talkers produce lexical items that both vary from production to production and vary from the same lexical item produced by another talker. These between-talker differences in the acoustic (or visible) composition of speech utterances can be driven by numerous idiolectic characteristics of the talker. Listeners seem to have little difficulty in comprehending these varying speech signals. Idiolectic or talker-specific information is unique to the individual and helps listeners identify a talker by voice alone. This information includes acoustic factors such as spectral structure, formant frequencies, and pitch, as well as articulatory rate, intonation, and vocal intensity. Talker-specific information can also be conveyed through visible articulatory style. Early models of speech perception considered talker characteristics to be a problem that needed solving by the listeners. For example, researchers in 1989 showed that multiple-talker lists are more detrimental to spoken word recognition than single-talker lists. The authors suggest that these results are due to high processing demands on the perceptual system, which required restructuring for each new voice getting heard (Adank, 2010, 1909).

Alternatively, the processing costs incurred by presenting multiple talkers could be due to memory interference that occurs when memories containing talker information, matched to a lexicon. Extending these findings, the researchers in 1991 showed that the effects of talker variability were dependent on the rate of stimuli presentation. When provided a lengthy presentation rate, words in early positions of multiple-talker lists, recalled more accurately than words in single talker lists suggesting that talker-specific information is an integral part of speech processing. However, other evidence reveals that familiarity with talker-specific information is beneficial to perception and recognition of the ...