The Benefit of Bimodal Training in Voice Learning

It is known that talkers can be recognized by listening to their specific vocal qualities—breathiness and fundamental frequencies. However, talker identification can also occur by focusing on the talkers’ unique articulatory style, which is known to be available auditorily and visually and can be shared across modalities. Evidence shows that voices heard while seeing talkers’ faces are later recognized better on their own compared to the voices heard alone. The present study investigated whether the facilitation of voice learning through facial cues relies on talker-specific articulatory or nonarticulatory facial information. Participants were initially trained to learn the voices of ten talkers presented either on their own or together with (a) an articulating face, (b) a static face, or (c) an isolated articulating mouth. Participants were then tested on recognizing the voices on their own regardless of their training modality. Consistent with previous research, voices learned with articulating faces were recognized better on their own compared to voices learned alone. However, isolated articulating mouths did not provide an advantage in learning the voices. The results demonstrated that learning voices while seeing faces resulted in better voice learning compared to the voices learned alone.