The effect of familiarity with a voice on continuous shadowing: Effects of explicit knowledge, but not of implicit familiarity

Abstract

Listeners were asked to shadow a target voice while a second voice spoke fluently in the background. Listeners differed in their familiarity with the target voice: members of the first group of listeners were familiar with the voice and were told explicitly whose voice they would be hearing; members of a second group were familiar with the target voice but were not warned whose voice it was, and members of a third group were entirely unfamiliar with the target voice. Familiarity was from real-world experience: the voice was that of one of the participant’s professors. Explicit knowledge of talker identity appeared to have the larger effect on listener performance: Participants in the first group made significantly fewer shadowing errors than those in the second group. In contrast, simple familiarity with a voice had no such influence. Familiarity did influence the types of errors listeners made, however: those participants who were familiar with the target voice prior to the test session made fewer incorrect responses than did those who had not heard the talker previously, although their total number of errors (including misses, as well as incorrect responses) did not differ.