Synthetic voice familiarity

To be eligible, both partners must meet the following criteria:

• Age: 18-40 years
• Know each other for at least six months and speak frequently to each other.
• No history of hearing or neurological issues
• Native North American English speaker

You and your partner will be invited to visit the laboratory independently for recording and experimental sessions.

1. During recording sessions, we will record your voices as you read sentences. Depending on how long you feel comfortable recording, we can do all the recordings on the same day for a total of 1.5-2h of recording. If you prefer to split the recording time, we may instead have two separate but shorter visits to the laboratory. After both you and your partner have finished all your recordings, there will be a wait period before you are contacted again for scheduling the experimental sessions. This period may last up to four months, depending on availability.
2. You and your partner will each attend an experimental session, which will last 1.5-2h. During the experimental session, you will listen to recordings made by other participants, including your partner, as well as synthetic voices. You will be asked to simply report the words you heard from certain target speakers.The synthetic voices you will hear during the experimental task will be generated by training machine learning models to mimic the voices from participants in this project. This will include you and your partner’s voice. These models will be used exclusively for scientific purpose.
3. In total participation in all the session (recording and experimental) altogether will last about 3-4 hours and you will be comensated $60 CAD for completing all sessions.

Principal Investigator: Ingrid Johnsrude
Study posted on: June 3rd, 2024
Recruitment open until: June 30th, 2025

For more information about this study please contact:

Bruno Mesquita: conchlab6@uwo.ca