I am on the research for studies that investigate speaker normalization in children. For example, I wonder whether children around the age of six years can already normalize acoustic differences between speakers as well as adults. Any suggestions for literature on this topic?
Looking forward to reading your suggestions.
I'm sending to you interesting book "Pediatric otolaryngology" by Bluestone et al - hope it will be usefull for you
Arkadiy,
Can you point to a page in this book which has any information relevant to the question?
Skimming for 10 minutes didn't turn up anything. The closest hist were in chapter 7, but there the discussion is on hearing loss rather than compensating for speaker differences (or any non-pathological phenomena for that matter).
Y(J)S
I am sorry if your search for information in this book has failed. I just suspected that this book would help you, but I was not sure about it ...
Unfortuntely, my search in the book suggested by Arkadiy Prodeus did not bring up any result either (Thanks, Yaakov J Stein, for having a look as well). In any case, I appreciated your recommendation. Any other suggestions?
Isabel,
I know of many studies on when phoneme detectors develop but never thought about your question.
Are we even sure that people perform speaker normalization in the same sense that speech recognition systems do (or at least used to before deep learning)?
Since we do know that one of the early layers of human speech recognition processing produces a sequence of best phoneme guesses, and higher layers can force backtracking to try the next best guesses, it is possible to check psychophysically if there is such a normalization at lower layers by checking the processing speed, and if there is a change in processing speed after normalization takes place.
It is also an interesting question how the speaker recognition and speech recognition processes are related. Do we first recognize the speaker and then apply that speaker's phoneme recognizers? I remember reading a paper a few years ago about recognizing accents before recognizing speech (but can't find the reference).
Another clue is Hearing different accents at home impacts language processing in infants from U Buffalo (www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171205104127.htm ) which found that infants exposed to multiple accents before 12 months develop different recognition strategies. See also the JASA reference there and
Linguistic processing of accented speech across the lifespan (www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00479/full).
Finally Language Discrimination by English-Learning 5-Month-Olds: Effects of Rhythm and Familiarity (labfon.letras.ulisboa.pt/personal/sfrota/aeli/Nazzi_Jusczyk_Johnson_2000.pdf) may be of use.
Would love to hear what you learn!
Y(J)S
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