The effects of speech perception and speech comprehension on talker identification

Listeners identify talkers more accurately in their na­ tive language than an unknown, foreign language in a phenomenon called the language-familiarity effect. However, the psychological basis for this effect re­ mains unknown. Some have suggested that the linguistic processes involved in speech perception and comprehension facilitate native­language talker identification. Others have argued that talker identi­ fication is independent of linguistic processing and that increased familiarity with statistical properties of speech acoustics is sufficient to produce this ef­ fect. We report two experiments investigating whether linguistic processes facilitate talker identifi­ cation. Experiment 1 reveals that there is no native­language advantage for time­reversed speech, suggesting that acoustic factors do not explain the language­familiarity effect. Experiment 2 reveals that talker identification accuracy improves as a function of the linguistic content in speech, suggest­ ing that both speech perception and comprehension contribute to talker identification. Together, these re­ sults demonstrate a true linguistic basis for the language­familiarity effect in talker identification.