Speech Perception as a Talker-Contingent Process

Author: Lynne C. Nygaard, Mitchell S. Sommers and David B. Pisoni

Abstract:
To determine how familiarity with a talker's voice affects perception of spoken words, two groups of subjects learned to recognize a set of voices over a nine day period. One group then identified words at four signal-to-noise ratios that were produced by the same set of talkers. Control subjects identified words at the same signal-to-noise ratios that were produced by a different set of talker. The result showed that the ability to identify a talker's voice improved intelligibility of novel words produced by the same talkers. The results suggest that speech perception may involve talker-contingent processes whereby familiarity with aspects of the vocal source facilitates the phonetic analysis of the acoustic signal.