Tailored Perception: Individuals’ Speech and Music Perception Strategies Fit Their Perceptual Abilities

Perception involves integration of multiple dimensions that often serve overlapping, redundant functions, for example, pitch, duration, and amplitude in speech. Individuals tend to prioritize these dimensions differently (stable, individualized perceptual strategies), but the reason for this has remained unclear. Here we show that perceptual strategies relate to perceptual abilities. In a speech cue weighting experiment (trial N = 990), we first demonstrate that individuals with a severe deficit for pitch perception (congenital amusics; N = 11) categorize linguistic stimuli similarly to controls (N = 11) when the main distinguishing cue is duration, which they perceive normally. In contrast, in a prosodic task where pitch cues are the main distinguishing factor, we show that amusics place less importance on pitch and instead rely more on duration cues—even when pitch differences in the stimuli are large enough for amusics to discern. In a second experiment testing musical and prosodic phrase interpretation (N = 16 amusics; 15 controls), we found that relying on duration allowed amusics to overcome their pitch deficits to perceive speech and music successfully. We conclude that auditory signals, because of their redundant nature, are robust to impairments for specific dimensions, and that optimal speech and music perception strategies depend not only on invariant acoustic dimensions (the physical signal), but on perceptual dimensions whose precision varies across individuals. Computational models of speech perception (indeed, all types of perception involving redundant cues e.g., vision and touch) should therefore aim to account for the precision of perceptual dimensions and characterize individuals as well as groups.