Time course of talker-specific learning in spoken word recognition.
Lynne C. Nygaard, Sabrina K. Sidaras, Jessica E. D. Alexander · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2008
The current study examined the effects of talker-specific perceptual learning on the time course of spoken word processing to assess the point at which effects of talker familiarity emerge during spoken word recognition. Listeners learned to identify six talkers’ voices (three males, three females) over three days of training. At test, listeners either completed an immediate or a delayed word-shadowing task. Items at test were novel words produced by the six familiar talkers heard during training and by a set of six unfamiliar talkers. A separate group of controls completed the test phase only. The results indicated that effects of talker familiarity were found in both the immediate and delayed shadowing tasks. Listeners were faster to shadow words produced by familiar than unfamiliar talkers both when responding immediately to the word and when responding after a cued delay. When tested with unfamiliar talkers, the trained listeners did not differ from untrained controls. These findings suggest that effects of talker familiarity emerge relatively early in spoken word processing and persist as word recognition unfolds. Perceptual learning of talker-specific characteristics appears to influence the time course of lexical processing by facilitating the rapid recovery of the linguistic structure of spoken words.