| This project investigates the nature of voice category formation, testing how listeners use distributional information about voices, how fast they create voice categories, what the role of segmental and nonsegmental information is, and how plastic, how long-lasting and how general their voice knowledge is. Voice-morph continua are synthetized and listeners' readiness to perceive different portions of the continua as specific voices is tested in multisession training studies. Behavioural findings are further exploited in fMRI experiments that search for neural traces of statistical learning and category formation in voice-sensitive cortical regions. |
