Listener Expectations and the Perceptual Accommodation of Talker Variability: A Pre-registered Replication

Researchers have hypothesized that in order to accommodate variability in how talkers produce their speech sounds, listeners must perform a process of talker normalization. Consistent with this proposal, several studies have shown that spoken word recognition is slowed when speech is produced by multiple talkers compared with when all speech is produced by one talker (a multitalker processing cost). Nusbaum and colleagues have argued that talker normalization is modulated by attention (e.g., Nusbaum & Morin, 1992, Speech Perception, Production and Linguistic Structure, pp. 113-134). Some of the strongest evidence for this claim is from a speeded monitoring study where a group of participants who expected to hear two talkers showed a multitalker processing cost, but a separate group who expected one talker did not (Magnuson & Nusbaum, 2007, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 33[2], 391-409). In that study, however, the sample size was small and the crucial interaction was not significant. In this registered report, we present the results of a well-powered attempt to replicate those findings. In contrast to the previous study, we did not observe multitalker processing costs in either of our groups. To rule out the possibility that the null result was due to task constraints, we conducted a second experiment using a speeded classification task. As in Experiment 1, we found no influence of expectations on talker normalization, with no multitalker processing cost observed in either group. Our data suggest that the previous findings of Magnuson and Nusbaum (2007) be regarded with skepticism and that talker normalization may not be permeable to high-level expectations.