Cross-language Familiar Talker Advantage

Previous research has shown that familiar talkers are more intelligible than unfamiliar talkers. In the current study, we tested the source of this familiar talker advantage by manipulating the type of talker information available in the signal. Two groups of listeners were trained to identify the voices of five German-English bilingual talkers; one group learned the voices from German stimuli and the other from English stimuli. After three days of training, all listeners performed a word recognition task in English. Consistent with previous findings, English-trained listeners found the speech of trained talkers to be more intelligible than untrained talkers, as measured by whole words and phonemes correct. German-trained listeners, however, showed no familiar talker advantage, suggesting that listeners must have knowledge of talker-specific, linguistically relevant information to elicit the familiar talker advantage.