title: SPEECH PERCEPTION AS A TALKER-CONTINGENT PROCESS.
abstract: To determine how familiarity with a talker's voice affects perception of spoken words, we trained two groups of subjects to recognize a set of voices over a 9-day period. One group then identified novel words produced by the same set of talkers at four signal-to-noise ratios. Control subjects identified the same words produced by a different set of talkers. The results showed that the ability to identify a talker's voice improved intelligibility of novel words produced by that talker. The results suggest that speech perception may involve talker-contingent processes whereby perceptual learning of aspects of the vocal source facilitates the subsequent phonetic analysis of the acoustic signal.
authors.affiliation: Indiana University.
authors.forename: Lynne C
authors.initials: LC
authors.lastname: Nygaard
authors.forename: Mitchell S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Sommers
authors.forename: David B
authors.initials: DB
authors.lastname: Pisoni