Learning to Recognize Unfamiliar Voices: An Online Study With 12- and 24-Month-Olds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Young infants are attuned to the indexical properties of speech: they can recognize highly familiar voices and distinguish them from unfamiliar voices. Less is known about how and when infants start to recognize unfamiliar voices, and to map them to faces. This skill is particularly challenging when portions of the speaker’s face are occluded, as is the case with masking. Here, we examined voice−face recognition abilities in infants 12 and 24 months of age. Using the online Lookit platform, children saw and heard four different speakers produce words with sonorous phonemes (high talker information), and words with phonemes that are less sonorous (low talker information). Infants aged 24 months, but not 12 months, were able to learn to link the voices to partially occluded faces of unfamiliar speakers, and only when the words were produced with high talker information. These results reveal that 24-month-old infants can encode and retrieve indexical properties of an unfamiliar speaker’s voice, and they can access this information even when visual access to the speaker’s mouth is blocked.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".