Voice perception as a bridge between psychoacoustics and speech intelligibility

While clinical assessments of speech intelligibility focus on the reception of phonetic to lexical cues by a listener, in natural situations, speech also contains cues that inform the listener about the identity of the talker, or their emotional state. These indexical cues contribute to the access of phonetic information, either through talker normalisation, or by promoting the segregation of competing talkers. They can also directly affect the interpretation of the lexical content, e.g., through prosody. In other words, indexical cues play a crucial role in everyday communication. Yet, they are rarely considered in clinical evaluations of hearing impairment. Through various studies involving child and adult hearing aid and cochlear implant users, it appears that some voice cues are more affected by hearing loss than others, and this could have consequences on the development and remediation strategies. These studies also highlight the central role that voice perception study could play in connecting psychoacoustics to communication sciences. As voice literally carries the linguistic information in speech, it sits at the forefront of auditory processing. The mechanisms underpinning hearing loss thus tend to directly affect the neural representations of voice properties. As voice manipulation technologies are becoming more precise and more widely available, new opportunities arise to link peripheral auditory deficits to speech processing difficulties in populations with impaired hearing.