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.