The Advantage of Knowing the Talker

Abstract

Background Many audiologists have observed a situation where a patient appears to understand something spoken by his/her spouse or a close friend but not the same information spoken by a stranger. However, it is not clear whether this observation reflects choice of communication strategy or a true benefit derived from the talker’s voice. Purpose The current study measured the benefits of long-term talker familiarity for older individuals with hearing impairment in a variety of listening situations. Research Design In Experiment 1, we measured speech recognition with familiar and unfamiliar voices when the difficulty level was manipulated by varying levels of a speech-shaped background noise. In Experiment 2, we measured the benefit of a familiar voice when the background noise was other speech (informational masking). Study Sample A group of 31 older listeners with high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss participated in the study. Fifteen of the participants served as talkers, and sixteen as listeners. In each case, the talker-listener pair for the familiar condition represented a close, long-term relationship (spouse or close friend). Data Collection and Analysis Speech-recognition scores were compared using controlled stimuli (low-context sentences) recorded by the study talkers. The sentences were presented in quiet and in two levels of speech-spectrum noise (Experiment 1) as well as in multitalker babble (Experiment 2). Repeated-measures analysis of variance was used to compare performance between the familiar and unfamiliar talkers, within and across conditions. Results Listeners performed better when speech was produced by a talker familiar to them, whether that talker was in a quiet or noisy environment. The advantage of the familiar talker was greater in a more adverse listening situation (i.e., in the highest level of background noise), but was similar for speech-spectrum noise and multi-talker babble. Conclusions The present data support a frequent clinical observation: listeners can understand their spouse better than a stranger. This effect was present for all our participants and occurred under strictly controlled conditions in which the only possible cue was the voice itself, rather than under normal communicative conditions where listener accommodation strategies on the part of the talker may confound the measurable benefit. The magnitude of the effect was larger than shown for short-term familiarity in previous work. This suggests that older listeners with hearing loss who inherently operate under deficient auditory conditions can benefit from experience with the voice characteristics of a long-term communication partner over many years of a relationship.

The role of talker familiarity in auditory distraction

“…Furthermore, these data showed that a person's familiarity with the talker did not influence the size of the ISE, whether the participants were informed of the talker's identity (Experiment 1) or received four days of talker training that 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 required them to attend to and interact with talker-specific characteristics of the voice (Experiment 2). These findings are in contrast to our hypotheses and previous speech perception research comparing listeners' perception of words spoken by familiar and unfamiliar voicesfamiliarity with the talker's voice typically yields a perceptual advantage (e.g., Barker & Newman, 2004;Souza et al, 2013;Yonan & Summers, 2000). However, it is important to note, the majority of these aforementioned studies exploring talker familiarity utilized talkers that the listeners had long-standing, personal relationships with (e.g., a parent or spouse).…”

Dialect Interference in Lexical Processing: Effects of Familiarity and Social Stereotypes

“…Performance on the local Midland talkers was consistently at 97% accuracy throughout experiment 1, but performance on the non-local Northern talkers ranged from 83 to 96% accuracy across experiments, and performance on the non-local Southern talkers ranged from 80 to 93% accuracy in experiment 2. These results are consistent with previous research suggesting that familiarity with a specific dialect can facilitate speech processing (Clopper, 2014;Floccia et al, 2006;Sumner and Samuel, 2009; see also Nygaard and Pisoni, 1998;Souza et al, 2013, on comparable talker familiarity effects).…”

Neural correlates of early sound encoding and their relationship to speech in noise perception

“…Naturalistic speech-in-noise situations offer multiple cues, many of them redundant, that can result in flexibility in how the task is solved. This is true to a lesser degree of clinical tests of SIN (including the HINT variant used here), which approximate the naturalistic experience of perceiving speech masked by sound, but lack factors that are important in real-life conversations such as familiarity with the talker [Nygaard et al, 1994; Souza et al, 2013], visual cues [Zion Golumbic et al, 2013], and context- and listener-dependent adaptations of the speaker [Lombard, 1911]. Tasks that have been used to study the neural correlates of SIN perception range in cue-richness from natural language comprehension in daily life, to intermediate tasks like the sentence-in-noise and word-in-noise measures, to discrimination of phonemes from among a restricted set of possibilities [Du et al, 2014], and finally to passively listening to single sounds with or without masking noise.…”