In 5 experiments, the authors investigated how listeners learn to recognize unfamiliar talkers and how experience with specific utterances generalizes to novel instances. Listeners were trained over several days to identify 10 talkers from natural, sinewave, or reversed speech sentences. The sinewave signals preserved phonetic and some suprasegmental properties while eliminating natural vocal quality. In contrast, the reversed speech signals preserved vocal quality while distorting temporally based phonetic properties. The training results indicate that listeners learned to identify talkers even from acoustic signals lacking natural vocal quality. Generalization performance varied across the different signals and depended on the salience of phonetic information. The results suggest similarities in the phonetic attributes underlying talker recognition and phonetic perception.When a talker produces an utterance, the listener simultaneously apprehends the linguistic form of the message as well as the nonlinguistic attributes of the talker's unique vocal anatomy and pronunciation habits. Anatomical and stylistic differences in articulation convey an array of personal or indexical qualities, such as personal identity, sex, approximate age, ethnicity, personality, intentions or emotional state, level of alcohol intoxication, and facial expression (see Bricker