Speech exposure familiarizes listeners with talkers’ vocal identity

Abstract

Talker identification experiments typically explicitly train listeners to identify voices. Ecologically, however, listeners learn to identify talkers without explicit practice. Here, we investigated whether listeners gain familiarity with voices even when they are not explicitly identifying them. Participants were assigned to three different exposure tasks with feedback, exposing them to identical stimuli but differentially directing their attention between talkers’ vocal identity and verbal content: (1) identifying whether the talker and visual cue on each trial matched; (2) discriminating whether the talker was the same as the prior trial; (3) discriminating whether the speech content matched the previous trial. All three groups were then tested on their ability to learn to identify talkers from novel speech content. Critically, we manipulated whether the talkers during this post-test were the same or different than those heard during training. Regardless of exposure task, listeners were significantly more accurate at learning to identify talkers they had previously been exposed to versus novel talkers. The group that practiced identifying talkers during the exposure phase was only more accurate on exposed talkers. These results suggest that listeners learn talkers’ vocal identity during speech perception even if they have not been directed to attend to talker identity.