SPEECH-PERCEPTION AS A TALKER-CONTINGENT PROCESS

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 p roduced by the same set of talkers at for signal-to-noise ratios. Cont rol subjects identified the same words produced by a different set of talkers. The results showed that the ability to identify a talker's vo ice improved intelligibility of novel words produced by that talker. T he results suggest that speech perception may involve talker-contingen t processes whereby perceptual learning of aspects of the vocal source facilitates the subsequent phonetic analysis of the acoustic signal.