Is perception personal?

Listeners' responses in speech perception experiments often differ from one another. A central question is whether those differences should be attributed to the ephemeral circumstances in which the listener participated or to the listener's inherent characteristics. One example suggesting they may be characteristic of the listener is Yu (2010), which found that neurotypical listeners who differed in the traits assessed by the Autism Spectrum Quotient questionnaire also differed in the extent to which they compensated for coarticulation. Despite doubling the sample size, the current AQ Experiment failed to replicate the specific dependencies reported by Yu between listeners' expression of those traits and their compensation for coarticulation. The B5 Experiment assessed the influence of the more comprehensive set of personality traits assessed by the Big-Five questionnaire on another group of neurotypical listeners' compensation for coarticulation. It showed that listeners' responses differed as a function of their expression of those traits, as well as their gender, but the size and direction of compensation differed between genders and individual personality traits. These failures suggest that the answer to the question posed in the title is, "no," in that listeners' performance either isn't predictable from their personality traits, or, it is predictable, but causality is elusive. The data, analysis code, stimuli, and a script for making the /s-ʃ/ continuum for the experiments reported here can be found at https://osf.io/gf4ha/ (DOI https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/GF4HA ). OPEN PRACTICES STATEMENT: This study was not pre-registered. The data, analysis code, and stimuli can be found at OSF: https://osf.io/gf4ha/ , (DOI https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/GF4HA ).