Listeners can extract either speaker identity or linguistic content from the same speech sound

Evidence

For example, when we hear the word “Groningen” from different speakers, we can categorize the gender of each speaker based on the pitch of the speaker’s voice. On the other hand, to analyze the linguistic content transmitted by a speech sound, we can ignore the unique pitch, timbre etc. of each speaker and categorize the sound into the distinct word category “Groningen”. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4881

Categorization

• QUESTION: The speaker-identity versus content dissociation connects to classic ‘who said what’ streams-of-processing debates worth chasing later.