Communication Sciences and Disorders Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2021
Journal
Psychological Science
Volume
32
Issue
6
First Page
903
Last Page
915
URL with Digital Object Identifier
10.1177/0956797621991137
Abstract
When people listen to speech in noisy places, they can understand more words spoken by someone familiar, such as a friend or partner, than someone unfamiliar. Yet we know little about how voice familiarity develops over time. We exposed participants (N = 50) to three voices for different lengths of time (speaking 88, 166, or 478 sentences during familiarization and training). These previously heard voices were recognizable and more intelligible when presented with a competing talker than novel voices—even the voice previously heard for the shortest duration. However, recognition and intelligibility improved at different rates with longer exposures. Whereas recognition was similar for all previously heard voices, intelligibility was best for the voice that had been heard most extensively. The speech-intelligibility benefit for the most extensively heard voice (10%–15%) is as large as that reported for voices that are naturally very familiar (friends and spouses)—demonstrating that the intelligibility of a voice can be improved substantially after only an hour of training.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License