The 2025-2026 Linguistics Colloquium series begins on Monday, September 8, with a talk by Jody Kreiman (UCLA). The talk will take place in Dwinelle 370 and synchronously via Zoom from 3:10-4:30pm. The title is "What do listeners know about voices?" and the abstract is as follows:
Voice is foundational in human (and mammalian) social behavior, conveying spoken messages and impressions of physical or social attributes, distinguishing one phoneme from another, encoding group membership and/or personal identity, expressing nuances of attitude and emotion, and so on, all seemingly by means of a relatively small number of psychoacoustic parameters. Understanding how all this happens requires knowledge of how voices differ from one another, and how they differ within speakers across utterances, in their acoustic structure. Where is the information that separates one speaker or one quality from another? As listeners we know a great deal about this, based on our life-long experience listening to voices; but as scientists we know relatively little. In this talk I will present ongoing studies of the structure of a psychoacoustic space for voices, and discuss how the observed structure may help us navigate the complex vocal auditory scene that surrounds us.