Talker and accent familiarity yield advantages for voice identity perception: a voice sorting study

Familiarity benefits in voice identity perception have been frequently described in the literature. Typically, studies have contrasted listeners who were either familiar or unfamiliar with the target voices, thus manipulating talker familiarity. In these studies, familiarity with a voice results in more accurate voice identity perception. Such talker familiarity is, however, only one way in which listeners can be familiar the stimuli used: Another type of familiarity that has been shown to benefit voice identity perception is language or accent familiarity. In the current study, we examine and compare the effects of talker and accent familiarity in the context of a voice identity sorting task, using naturally varying voice recording samples from the TV show “Derry Girls”. Voice samples were thus all spoken with a regional accent of UK/Irish English (Northern Irish). We tested four listeners groups: Listeners were either familiar or unfamiliar with the TV show (and therefore the talker identities) and were either highly familiar or relatively less familiar with the accent. We find that both talker and accent familiarity significantly improve accuracy of voice identity perception. However, the effect sizes for effects of talker familiarity are overall larger. We discuss our findings in light of existing models of voice perception, arguing that they provide evidence for interactions of speech and identity processing pathways in voice perception. We conclude that voice perception is a highly interactive process, during which listeners make use of any available information to achieve their perceptual goals.

The Effect of Talker Familiarity on Sentence Recognition Accuracy in Complex Noise

The familiar talker advantage is the finding that a listener’s ability to perceive and understand a talker is facilitated when the listener is familiar with the talker. However, it is unclear when the benefits of familiarity emerge and whether they strengthen over time. To better understand the time course of the familiar talker advantage, we assessed the effects of long-term, implicit voice learning on 89 young adults’ sentence recognition accuracy in the presence of four-talker babble. A university professor served as the target talker in the experiment. Half the participants were students of the professor and familiar with her voice. The professor was a stranger to the remaining participants. We manipulated the listeners’ degree of familiarity with the professor over the course of a semester. We used mixed effects modeling to test for the effects of the two independent variables: talker and hours of exposure. Analyses revealed a familiar talker advantage in the listeners after 16 weeks (∼32 h) of exposure to the target voice. These results imply that talker familiarity (outside of the confines of a long-term, familial relationship) seems to be a much quicker-to-emerge, reliable cue for bootstrapping spoken language perception than previous literature suggested.

Test-Retest Reliability of Ecological Momentary Assessment in Audiology Research

Background Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is a methodology involving repeated surveys to collect in situ data that describe respondents' current or recent experiences and related contexts in their natural environments. Audiology literature investigating the test-retest reliability of EMA is scarce. Purpose This article examines the test-retest reliability of EMA in measuring the characteristics of listening contexts and listening experiences. Research Design An observational study. Study Sample Fifty-one older adults with hearing loss. Data Collection and Analysis The study was part of a larger study that examined the effect of hearing aid technologies. The larger study had four trial conditions and outcome was measured using a smartphone-based EMA system. After completing the four trial conditions, participants repeated one of the conditions to examine the EMA test-retest reliability. The EMA surveys contained questions that assessed listening context characteristics including talker familiarity, talker location, and noise location, as well as listening experiences including speech understanding, listening effort, loudness satisfaction, and hearing aid satisfaction. The data from multiple EMA surveys collected by each participant were aggregated in each of the test and retest conditions. Test-retest correlation on the aggregated data was then calculated for each EMA survey question to determine the reliability of EMA. Results At the group level, listening context characteristics and listening experience did not change between the test and retest conditions. The test-retest correlation varied across the EMA questions, with the highest being the questions that assessed talker location (median r = 1.0), reverberation (r = 0.89), and speech understanding (r = 0.85), and the lowest being the items that quantified noise location (median r = 0.63), talker familiarity (r = 0.46), listening effort (r = 0.61), loudness satisfaction (r = 0.60), and hearing aid satisfaction (r = 0.61). Conclusion Several EMA questions yielded appropriate test-retest reliability results. The lower test-retest correlations for some EMA survey questions were likely due to fewer surveys completed by participants and poorly designed questions. Therefore, the present study stresses the importance of using validated questions in EMA. With sufficient numbers of surveys completed by respondents and with appropriately designed survey questions, EMA could have reasonable test-retest reliability in audiology research.

The effect of talker familiarity on sentence recognition accuracy over time

The familiar talker advantage (FTA) reflects the robust research finding that a listener’s ability to perceive and understand a talker in noise is facilitated when the listener is familiar with the talker. However, it is unclear when the benefits of said familiarity first emerge and whether or not they strengthen over time. To better understand the time course of the FTA, we assessed the effects of long-term, implicit voice learning on 89 young adults’ sentence recognition accuracy in the presence of 4-talker babble. A university professor served as the target talker in the experiment. Half the participants were students of the professor and familiar with her voice. The professor was a stranger to the remaining participants. We manipulated the listeners’ degree of familiarity with the professor over the course of a semester. To test for the effects of the two independent variables: talker (familiar, novel) and time of testing (early: Time 1, late: Time 2), we used mixed effects modeling. Analyses revealed that an FTA emerged in the listeners after only 16 weeks (~32 hours) of exposure to the target voice in a college classroom setting. The FTA also strengthened over time. Implicit exposure to the target talker’s voice for ~12 hours over approximately 4 weeks was not enough time to yield an FTA. The present results imply that talker familiarity (outside of the confines of a long-term, familial relationship) seems to be a much quicker-to-emerge and reliable cue for bootstrapping spoken language perception than previous literature suggested.

The role of talker familiarity in auditory distraction

The current research employed a classic irrelevant sound effect paradigm and investigated the talker-specific content of the irrelevant speech. Specifically, we aimed to determine if the participants’ familiarity with the irrelevant speech’s talker affected the magnitude of the irrelevant sound effect. Experiment 1was an exploration of talker familiarity established in a natural listening environment(i.e. a university classroom)in which we manipulated the participants’ relationships with the talker. In Experiment 2 we manipulated the participants’ familiarity with the talker via 4 days of controlled exposure to the target talker’s audio recordings. For both Experiments1 and 2, a robust effect of irrelevant speech was found; however, regardless of the talker manipulation, talker familiarity did not influence the size of the effect. We interpreted the results within the processing view of the auditory distraction effect and highlighted the notion that talker familiarity may be more vulnerable than once thought.

The Role of Talker Familiarity in Auditory Distraction

The current research employed a classic irrelevant sound effect paradigm and investigated the talker-specific content of the irrelevant speech. Specifically, we aimed to determine if the participants’ familiarity with the irrelevant speech’s talker affected the magnitude of the irrelevant sound effect. Experiment 1 was an exploration of talker familiarity established in a natural listening environment (i.e., a university classroom) in which we manipulated the participants’ relationships with the talker. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the participants’ familiarity with the talker via 4 days of controlled exposure to the target talker’s audio recordings. For both Experiments 1 and 2, a robust effect of irrelevant speech was found; however, regardless of the talker manipulation, talker familiarity did not influence the size of the effect. We interpreted the results within the processing view of the auditory distraction effect and highlighted the notion that talker familiarity may be more vulnerable than once thought.

Working-memory disruption by task-irrelevant talkers depends on degree of talker familiarity

When listening, familiarity with an attended talker’s voice improves speech comprehension. Here, we instead investigated the effect of familiarity with a distracting talker. In an irrelevant-speech task, we assessed listeners’ working memory for the serial order of spoken digits when a task-irrelevant, distracting sentence was produced by either a familiar or an unfamiliar talker (with rare omissions of the task-irrelevant sentence). We tested two groups of listeners using the same experimental procedure. The first group were undergraduate psychology students (N=66) who had attended an introductory statistics course. Critically, each student had been taught by one of two course instructors, whose voices served as familiar and unfamiliar task-irrelevant talkers. The second group of listeners were family members and friends (N=20) who had known either one of the two talkers for more than ten years. Students, but not family members and friends, made more errors when the task-irrelevant talker was familiar versus unfamiliar. Interestingly, the effect of talker familiarity was not modulated by the presence of task-irrelevant speech: students experienced stronger working-memory disruption by a familiar talker irrespective of whether they heard a task-irrelevant sentence during memory retention or merely expected it. While previous work has shown that familiarity with an attended talker benefits speech comprehension, our findings indicate that familiarity with an ignored talker deteriorates working memory for target speech. The absence of this effect in family members and friends suggests that the degree of familiarity modulates memory disruption.