Acoustic differences, listener expectations, and the perceptual accommodation of talker variability

Two talkers' productions of the same phoneme may be quite different acoustically, whereas their productions of different speech sounds may be virtually identical. Despite this lack of invariance in the relationship between the speech signal and linguistic categories, listeners experience phonetic constancy across a wide range of talkers, speaking styles, linguistic contexts, and acoustic environments. The authors present evidence that perceptual sensitivity to talker variability involves an active cognitive mechanism: Listeners expecting to hear 2 different talkers differing only slightly in average pitch showed performance costs typical of adjusting to talker variability, whereas listeners hearing the same materials but expecting a single talker or given no special instructions did not show these performance costs. The authors discuss the implications for understanding phonetic constancy despite variability between talkers (and other sources of variability) and for theories of speech perception. The results provide further evidence for active, controlled processing in real-time speech perception and are consistent with a model of talker normalization that involves contextual tuning.