Speech Perception as a Talker-Contingent Process

• DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.1994.tb00612.x
• Publication Date: 2006-04-07T23:33:15Z
• Authors: Lynne C Nygaard; Mitchell S Sommers; David B Pisoni
• Keywords: 05 social sciences; 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences

To determine how familiarity with a talker's voice affects perception of spoken words, we trained two groups of subjects to recognize a set of voices over a 9-day period One group then identified novel words produced by the same set of talkers at four signal-to-noise ratios Control subjects identified the same words produced by a different set of talkers The results showed that the ability to identify a talker's voice improved intelligibility of novel words produced by that talker The results suggest that speech perception may involve talker-contingent processes whereby perceptual learning of aspects of the vocal source facilitates the subsequent phonetic analysis of the acoustic signal