Talker familiarity effects on speech-in-speech perception

Abstract

Talker familiarity can facilitate the extraction of linguistic content from speech signals embedded in broadband noise; however, relatively little research has investigated the impact of talker familiarity with competing speech in the background. This study explores the effects of familiarity with the target or competing talker in speech-in-speech perception. Listeners were first familiarized with and trained to identify three female voices. They then completed a sentence recognition task in the presence of 1-talker babble. Familiarity with either the target or background talker was manipulated in separate conditions. Results revealed significantly better sentence recognition for familiar relative to unfamiliar target talkers in the presence of an unfamiliar background talker; however, sentence recognition with an unfamiliar target talker did not differ depending on background talker familiarity. Thus, while listeners were able to capitalize on familiarity with a talker’s voice to aid target speech recognition, familiarity with the competing talker was neither facilitative nor inhibitory. This suggests that the influence of talker familiarity is limited to the actively attended stream. This stands in contrast to other aspects of the unattended stream which have been shown to exert an influence on speech-in-speech recognition including language and semantic content of the background speech.