Previous studies have shown that listeners are better able to understand speech when they are familiar with the talker's voice. In most of these studies, talker familiarity was ensured by explicit voice training; that is, listeners learned to identify the familiar talkers. In the real world, however, the characteristics of familiar talkers are learned incidentally, through communication. The pr...

It has been documented that talkers can be trained to produce "clear" speech, which is significantly more intelligible for hearing-impaired listeners. In this study, the ability of both younger and older talkers to produce clear speech after a minimal amount of instruction and practice was investigated. Tape recordings were made with the talkers attempting to produce both conversational-style a...

This study investigates the cross-language coarticulation patterns in Australian English and Japanese. F2 trajectories between the vowel target and vowel onset/offset in the context of /d/ were plotted and locus equations were fitted to the datapoints to capture the degree of coarticulation. Three talker groups were considered: native talkers of Australian English (AE), L2 English talkers (L1 J...

Phonological differences between regional dialects of American English are well established in the sociolinguistics literature. The perception of these phonological differences by naïve listeners is much less well understood, however. Using an existing corpus of spoken sentences produced by talkers from a number of distinct regional dialects in the United States, an acoustic analysis was conduc...

Talkers modify their speech production in noisy environments partly as a reflex but also as an intentional communicative strategy to facilitate the transmission of the speech signal to the interlocutor. Previous studies have shown that talkers can adapt both auditory and visual elements of speech produced in noise. The current study examined whether auditory and visual speech production would b...

In cochlear implants (CIs), different talkers often produce different levels of speech understanding because of the spectrally distorted speech patterns provided by the implant device. A spectral normalization approach was used to transform the spectral characteristics of one talker to those of another talker. In Experiment 1, speech recognition with two talkers was measured in CI users, with a...

The identification of the gender of an unfamiliar talker is an easy and automatic process for naïve adult listeners. Sociolinguistic research has consistently revealed gender differences in the production of linguistic variables. Research on the perception of dialect variation, however, has been limited almost exclusively to male talkers. In the present study, naïve participants were asked to c...

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 ...

Listener similarity judgments of languages seem to be influenced by regional speech characteristics and talker voice quality, and listener responses to voice quality are influenced by language. This study attempted to assess the relationships between judgments about voice quality and judgments about language. In the first experiment, using an ABX format listeners matched spoken samples of unkno...

The nondeterministic relationship between speech acoustics and abstract phonemic representations imposes a challenge for listeners to maintain perceptual constancy despite the highly variable acoustic realization of speech. Talker normalization facilitates speech processing by reducing the degrees of freedom for mapping between encountered speech and phonemic representations. While this process...