The Oxford Handbook of Voice Perception (Oxford Library of Psychology)

Speech perception has been the focus of innumerable studies over the past decades. While our abilities to recognize individuals by their voice state plays a central role in our everyday social interactions, limited scientific attention has been devoted to the perceptual and cerebral mechanisms underlying nonverbal information processing in voices. The Oxford Handbook of Voice Perception takes a comprehensive look at this emerging field and presents a selection of current research in voice perception. The forty chapters summarise the most exciting research from across several disciplines covering acoustical, clinical, evolutionary, cognitive, and computational perspectives. In particular, this handbook offers an invaluable window into the development and evolution of the 'vocal brain', and considers in detail the voice processing abilities of non-human animals or human infants. By providing a full and unique perspective on the recent developments in this burgeoning area of study, this text is an important and interdisciplinary resource for students, researchers, and scientific journalists interested in voice perception. The past decades have seen an explosion of research into the psychological, cognitive, neural, biological, and technical mechanisms of voice perception. These mechanisms refer to the general ability to extract information from voices expressed by other living beings or by technical systems. Voice perception research is now a lively area of research, which is studied from many different perspectives ranging from basic research on the acoustic analysis of vocalizations and the neural and cognitive mechanisms, to comparative research across ages, species, and cultures, up to applied research in the field of machine-based generation and decoding of voices, telecommunication, psychiatry, and neurology. This handbook provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview on all the major research fields related to voice perception The Oxford Handbook of Voice Perception gathers in forty chapters the most exciting research from several disciplines related to voice perception. In particular, it draws attention to what has not been the focus of this field of research - the perceptual and cerebral mechanisms underlying nonverbal information processing in voices.