Personality traits fail to explain why listeners hear speech differently

When two people listen to the same ambiguous sound, they often disagree about what they heard. One listener categorizes a fricative as an “s” while another, hearing the identical waveform, hears “sh.” For decades, speech scientists have debated whether such disagreements reflect the fleeting circumstances of an experiment or stable, personal characteristics of the listeners themselves. A new study by John Kingston of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, puts that question to a rigorous test and arrives at a sobering answer: perception, at least in this domain, does not appear to be predictably personal.

The phenomenon at the heart of the study is known as compensation for coarticulation. Speech sounds are produced in a continuous stream, and neighboring sounds blur into one another. When a fricative such as “s” or “sh” follows a vowel, listeners systematically shift the boundary between the two categories depending on the vowel they heard. After a vowel like “a,” which pushes the tongue body back and lowers the acoustic energy in the high-frequency range, listeners are more likely to categorize an ambiguous fricative as “sh”; after “i” or “u,” the boundary shifts the other way. This context effect, first documented systematically by Mann and Repp in 1980, is one of the most robust findings in speech perception, yet the size of the effect varies considerably from one listener to the next.

The obvious candidate for explaining that variation is personality. In 2010, researcher Alice Yu reported a striking result: neurotypical listeners who scored higher on the Autism Spectrum Quotient, a questionnaire measuring traits associated with the autism spectrum, compensated less for coarticulation. The finding resonated widely, in part because it connected a low-level perceptual effect to broader theories about how autistic traits shape cognitive style, including attention to detail and reduced sensitivity to context. It also fed into a growing literature on individual differences in phonology, suggesting that the seeds of sound change might lie in the perceptual quirks of particular listeners.

Kingston’s study set out to replicate that result with substantially more statistical power. The original work had relied on a modest sample, and the replication crisis in psychology has repeatedly shown that small samples can produce seductive correlations that evaporate under scrutiny. In the new AQ experiment, the number of participants was more than doubled, and the analysis was rebuilt from the ground up using Bayesian multilevel modeling, a framework that estimates full probability distributions over parameter values rather than single point estimates. Listeners completed the Autism Spectrum Quotient, including its subtests covering attention switching, attention to detail, communication, imagination, and social skills, before categorizing stimuli drawn from a synthetic continuum between “s” and “sh” embedded in different vowel contexts.

The outcome was unambiguous. Despite the larger sample and the more sensitive analysis, the specific dependencies that Yu had reported between autistic traits and compensation for coarticulation failed to replicate. Listeners still showed the classic context effects, and their responses still varied from person to person, but the variation did not track their questionnaire scores in the way the original study had suggested. A related study by Lai and colleagues in 2022 had already reported that perceptual compensation and lexical effects were uncorrelated with AQ responses, though a recording problem with their questionnaire had complicated the comparison. The new results strengthen the case that the original correlation was fragile.

But Kingston did not stop at a failed replication. A second experiment, the B5 study, asked a broader question: perhaps the wrong personality instrument had been used. The Big-Five questionnaire, which measures agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, extraversion, and intellect-imagination, offers a more comprehensive map of personality structure than the AQ, and some researchers have argued that autistic traits are not an independent personality dimension at all but a particular configuration of Big-Five characteristics. If compensation for coarticulation reflects personality in any form, the Big-Five framework should have been able to detect it.

Here the results were more intriguing, and more complicated. Listeners’ categorization responses did differ as a function of their Big-Five trait profiles, and also as a function of their gender. Yet the size and even the direction of compensation varied across genders and across individual traits, with no single, coherent pattern emerging. Rather than revealing a clean mapping between a personality dimension and a perceptual strategy, the data showed a tangle of interactions whose interpretation is far from straightforward. The effects were real in the statistical sense, but they do not add up to a predictive theory of how a given person will hear a given sound.

Kingston draws a deliberately cautious conclusion. The answer to the question posed in the title, he suggests, is no, in one of two senses. Either listeners’ performance is not predictable from their personality traits at all, or it is predictable in principle but the causal pathway remains elusive, with the observed correlations possibly reflecting confounds rather than genuine perceptual consequences of temperament. Distinguishing between these possibilities would require experimental designs that go beyond correlating questionnaire scores with perceptual judgments, perhaps manipulating state rather than trait, or measuring perception repeatedly within individuals across time.

The study also carries a broader methodological message. The original 2010 finding had been cited widely and woven into theoretical accounts of sound change, in which individual perceptual differences were proposed as the raw material on which language evolution acts. If those differences are not reliably tied to measurable personality traits, then theories of sound change may need to find their sources of variation elsewhere, perhaps in the acoustics of different speech communities or in the sheer stochasticity of perceptual processing. The failure also illustrates why large replications matter: a correlation that looks compelling in a small sample can dissolve when the sample doubles and the analysis becomes more rigorous.

In keeping with the open-science practices that have become standard in the field, Kingston has made the data, analysis code, stimuli, and even the script for generating the s-to-sh continuum freely available on the Open Science Framework, allowing any researcher to scrutinize, reuse, or extend the work. Whatever the ultimate verdict on whether perception is personal, the tools for settling the question are now in everyone’s hands. For now, the sounds we hear may differ from person to person, but the reasons for those differences remain stubbornly, fascinatingly opaque.

Subject of Research: Individual differences in speech perception and compensation for coarticulation in relation to personality traits

Article Title: Is perception personal?

Article References: Kingston, J. (2026). Is perception personal?. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 88(7), Article 200. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-026-03340-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3758/s13414-026-03340-6

Keywords: speech perception, compensation for coarticulation, Autism Spectrum Quotient, Big Five personality, individual differences, replication, Bayesian modeling, psychoacoustics, phonetics, perceptual categorization, sound change, psycholinguistics