Paper accepted at Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
Be on the lookout for "Clearly, fame isn’t everything: Talker familiarity does not augment talker adaptation" in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, soon! This paper started as first author Emma Hatter's Culminating Undergraduate Experience in the fall of 2021, complete with online poster presentation. Emma completed an independent study to run Experiment 2 and write up the results before graduating in the spring of 2022, then helped us run Experiment 3 this fall. While many experiments report superior speech perception when listening to a single talker compared to multiple talkers, clear evidence that being familiar with the talkers' voices aids this process is lacking. Here, listeners' word recognition was again superior for a single talker, but this advantage was not affected when talkers were familiar (voices of the last 5 Presidents of the United States of America) or relatively unfamiliar (other age-matched politicians in less prominent positions). The Presidents' voices were more familiar and better recognized (in post-task questionnaires), but this familiarity advantage did not trickle down to aid in overcoming acoustic/talker variability, suggesting that talker consistency and talker familiarity might each benefit speech perception but do not combine synergistically.