“Identification and Discrimination of Bilingual Talkers Across Languages” by Stephen J. Winters, Susannah v. Levi, and David B. Pisoni, Article Critique Example

“Identification and discrimination of bilingual talkers across Languages” by Stephen J. Winters, Susannah V. Levi, and David B. Pisoni (Speech Research Laboratory, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana) goes into the investigation of how the perception of indexical properties of speech are affected by the similarities between languages.  The study is performed by examining bilingual talkers who are identified and discriminated by listeners across two diverse languages.

Two experiments were performed. In the first one, listeners were initially trained to recognize bilingual talkers while speaking one language, and then their capacity of identifying those talkers speaking another language was examined. In the second one, listeners were to make a distinction among bilingual talkers across languages in an AX discrimination paradigm. According to the results of the experiments the authors have concluded that “there is sufficient language-independent indexical information in speech for listeners to generalize knowledge of talkers’ voices across languages and to successfully discriminate between bilingual talkers regardless of the language they are speaking”.

Collective results gained through the study put forward the idea that indexical processing depends on language-dependent information as well as on language-independent information when considering speech signal. The results the experiment has proposed discover that in the process of performing set tasks listeners do not only use language-independent information. When trying to recognize talkers who are speaking a known language, listeners are more inclined to rely on language-dependent indexical cues. What is more, the predisposition to recognize two talkers as the “same” or “different” is dictated by the condition of whether the talkers are speaking in the same language. The context in which the listeners work on performing the tasks is important. The support on behalf of one view of speech perception does not essentially overthrow proofs for the other, thus providing that the kind of information which is accessible to listeners in the speech signal is taken into consideration.