The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Molly Babel, Professor at the University of British Columbia.  Dr. Babel will speak on "What’s in a voice? Language-specific and language-general phonetics".

Voices are rich with biological, social, and linguistic signatures all baked into the same signal. Bilingual voices are particularly interesting because when speaking one language or the other, a talker changes the linguistic and, often, social packaging, but an individual’s vocal tract anatomy remains constant. In this talk, I share our work on the acoustic structures across languages in Cantonese-English bilingual voices, which demonstrates that Cantonese-English bilingual voices are highly similar across languages (Johnson & Babel, 2023). This would suggest that it would be easy to track a bilingual’s identity across languages, which we know empirically not to be the case.  Armed, however, with the knowledge that there is substantial information shared across a bilingual’s languages, we test listeners from four language backgrounds, to assess whether group-level differences in voice learning are due (i)  to varying abilities to access the relative acoustic-phonetic features that distinguish a voice, (ii) to learn at a given rate, or (iii) to generalize learning of talker-voice associations to novel same-language and different-language utterances. Differences in performance across listener groups show evidence in support of the language familiarity effect and of the role of two mechanisms for voice learning: the extraction and association of talker-specific, language-general information that can be more robustly generalized across languages, and talker-specific, language-specific information that may be more readily accessible and learnable, but due to its language-specific nature, is less able to be extended to another language.