Abstract
Extensive research shows that inter-talker variability (i.e., changing the talker) affects recognition memory for speech signals. However, relatively little is known about the consequences of intra-talker variability (i.e. changes in speaking style within a talker) on the encoding of speech signals in memory. It is well established that speakers can modulate the characteristics of their own speech and produce a listener-oriented, intelligibility-enhancing speaking style in response to communication demands (e.g., when speaking to listeners with hearing impairment or non-native speakers of the language). Here we conducted two experiments to examine the role of speaking style variation in spoken language processing. First, we examined the extent to which clear speech provided benefits in challenging listening environments (i.e. speech-in-noise). Second, we compared recognition memory for sentences produced in conversational and clear speaking styles. In both experiments, semantically normal and anomalous sentences were included to investigate the role of higher-level linguistic information in the processing of speaking style variability. The results show that acoustic-phonetic modifications implemented in listener-oriented speech lead to improved speech recognition in challenging listening conditions and, crucially, to a substantial enhancement in recognition memory for sentences.
Highlights
Spoken language contains information both about the content of a message and about the speaker of that message
Clear speech was characterized by significantly greater energy in the 1– 3 kHz range (p = .002)
The analyses confirmed that the conversational and clear speech sentences differed in their acoustic-articulatory characteristics along the dimensions that are typically found in listener-oriented speaking style adaptations
Summary
Spoken language contains information both about the content of a message and about the speaker of that message. The perception of linguistic content has been studied separately from the indexical properties of talkers. The emphasis in this line of work has been on how abstract linguistic units can be extracted from the immense variability in the speech signal. This abstractionist approach has been supported by a number of neuroscientific studies, which have shown that these two types of information are processed differently in the brain [10,11,12,13,14,15]. The finding that indexical and lexical information are dissociable is consistent with abstractionist accounts
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