TALKER-SPECIFIC LEARNING IN SPEECH-PERCEPTION

The effects of perceptual learning of talker identity on the recogniti on of spoken words and sentences were investigated in three experiment s. In each experiment, listeners were trained to learn a set of 10 tal kers' voices and were then given an intelligibility test to assess the influence of learning the voices on the processing of the linguistic content of speech. In the first experiment, listeners learned voices f rom isolated words and were then tested with novel isolated words mixe d in noise. The results showed that listeners who were given words pro duced by familiar talkers at test showed better identification perform ance than did listeners who were given words produced by unfamiliar ta lkers. Ln the second experiment, listeners learned novel voices from s entence-length utterances and were then presented with isolated words. The results showed that learning a talker's voice from sentences did not generalize well to identification of novel isolated words. In the third experiment, Listeners learned voices from sentence-length uttera nces and were then given sentence-length utterances produced by famili ar and unfamiliar talkers at test. We found that perceptual learning o f novel voices from sentence-length utterances improved speech intelli gibility for words in sentences. Generalization and transfer from voic e learning to Linguistic processing was found to be sensitive to the t alker-specific information available during learning and test. These f indings demonstrate that increased sensitivity to talker-specific info rmation affects the perception of the linguistic properties of speech in isolated words and sentences.