Top-down effect of dialogue coherence on perceived speaker identity

A key mechanism in the comprehension of conversation is the ability for listeners to recognize who is speaking and when a speaker switch occurs. Some authors suggest that speaker change detection is accomplished through bottom-up mechanisms in which listeners draw on changes in the acoustic features of the auditory signal. Other accounts propose that speaker change detection involves drawing on top-down linguistic representations to identify who is speaking. The present study investigates these hypotheses experimentally by manipulating the pragmatic coherence of conversational utterances. In experiment 1, participants listened to pairs of utterances and had to indicate whether they heard the same or different speakers. Even though all utterances were spoken by the same speaker, our results show that when two segments of conversation are spoken by the same speaker but make sense for different speakers to say, listeners report hearing different speakers. In experiment 2 we removed pragmatic information from the same stimuli by scrambling word order while leaving acoustic information intact. In contrast to experiment 1, results from the second experiment indicate no difference between our experimental conditions. We interpret these results as a top-down effect of pragmatic expectations: knowledge of conversational structure at least partially determines a listener's perception of speaker changes in conversation.

Automated summary

Listeners can recognize speaker changes by relying on both acoustic features and linguistic representations. However, the coherence of the conversation plays a crucial role in this process. When utterances make sense for different speakers to say, even if they are spoken by the same person, listeners perceive them as being spoken by different speakers. On the other hand, when the pragmatic coherence is disrupted by scrambling word order, listeners are unable to detect speaker changes.