Clearly, fame isn’t everything: Talker familiarity does not mitigate the perceptual consequences of talker variability

Abstract

Familiarity with a talker’s voice provides numerous benefits to speech perception, including faster response times and improved intelligibility both in quiet and amidst competing talkers. However, it is unclear whether familiarity provides resilience against talker variability, or the increased processing costs attributed to hearing speech from multiple different talkers compared to a single talker. Here, listeners completed a speeded word recognition task where stimuli were the words “do” and “to” excised from political speeches, presented in either single- or multiple-talker blocks. Talkers were either famous (the last five U.S. Presidents) or non-famous (other male politicians of similar ages). No information about the talkers was provided. As predicted, listeners categorized words more quickly when spoken by famous talkers. However, talker familiarity did not provide any resiliency to talker variability; reaction times increased (from single- to multiple-talker blocks) by greater amounts for famous talkers than non-famous talkers. In a post-task questionnaire, participants recognized famous talkers better than non-famous talkers from the “do”/”to” target words, a full sentence, or when shown their names and asked if they knew who the talker was. Results were not correlated with self-rated political interest. Thus, familiarity might not alleviate the perceptual consequences of talker variability.