Individual Differences in Perceptual Cue Weighting: Behavioral, Neurophysiological, and Social Considerations

Speech perception involves the integration of multiple acoustic cues, whose relative weighting can vary substantially across individuals. Although speech categories are defined over multidimensional and often ambiguous acoustic spaces, listeners show systematic and stable individual differences in how they weight these cues, even within a single speech community. The sources of this variability, however, remain insufficiently understood.

This talk presents recent work examining individual differences in perceptual cue weighting from behavioral, neurophysiological, and social perspectives. Behavioral results demonstrate that listeners exhibit stable, listener-specific patterns of cue use. Neurophysiological findings further reveal that these differences are associated with variability in neural representations at multiple stages along the auditory pathway, suggesting that how phonetic cues are encoded and processed at the neural level constrains their perceptual weighting. Finally, social factors also contribute to this variability: individuals differ in the extent to which they incorporate perceived gender information into speech perception, which in turn modulates the weighting of phonetic cues such as voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (f0).

Together, these findings provide a more comprehensive account of the origins of individual variability in speech perception. They highlight the interaction between stable perceptual strategies, underlying neural representations, and socially mediated cue use, with important implications for theories of speech perception, sound change, and phonological knowledge.