Talker familiarity and the accommodation of talker variability

Magnuson, James S.; Nusbaum, Howard C.; Akahane-Yamada, Reiko; Saltzman, David

doi:10.3758/s13414-020-02203-y

When listeners encounter a difficult-to-understand talker in a difficult-to-understand situation, their perceptual mechanisms can adapt, making the talker in the situation easier to understand. This study examined talker-specific perceptual adaptation experimentally by embedding speech from second-language (L2) English talkers in varying levels of noise and collecting transcriptions from first-language English listeners (ten talkers, 100 listeners per experiment). Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that prior experience with a L2 talker's speech presented first without noise and then with gradually increasing levels of noise facilitated recognition of that talker in loud noise. Experiment 3 tested whether adaptation is driven by tuning-in to the talker's voice and speech patterns, by examining recognition of speech-in-loud-noise following experience with the talker in quiet. Finally, experiment 4 tested whether adaptation is driven by tuning-out the background noise, by measuring speech-in-loud-noise recognition after experience with the talker in consistently loud noise. The results showed that both tuning-in to the talker and tuning-out the noise contribute to talker-specific perceptual adaptation to L2 speech-in-noise.

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