It's not what you say but the way you say it: Matching faces and voices

Recent studies have shown that the face and voice of an unfamiliar person can be matched for identity (Kamachi, Hill, Lander, & Vatikiotis-Bateson, 2003; Lachs & Pisoni, 2004; Rosenblum et al., In press). Here we investigate the effects of paralinguistic changes on an XAB matching involving a change in modality between X and AB. A change between speaking a sentence as a statement and a question disrupted performance, whereas changing the sentence itself did not (Exp. 1). Altering manner between spontaneous and clear speech (Exp. 2), or between spontaneous and casual speech (Exp. 3), was also disruptive. However, artificially slowing (Exp. 4) or speeding (Exp. 5) speech had no effect. The results show that bi-modal cues to identity are closely linked to manner, but that content and absolute tempo are not critical. Instead prosodic variations in rhythmic structure and/or expressiveness may provide a bi-modal, dynamic identity signature