Clearly, Fame Isn't Everything: Talker Familiarity Does Not Augment Talker Adaptation

Familiarity with a talker's voice provides numerous benefits to speech perception, including faster responses and improved intelligibility in quiet and in noise. Yet, it is unclear whether familiarity facilitates talker adaptation, or the processing benefit stemming from hearing speech from one talker compared to multiple different talkers. Here, listeners completed a speeded recognition task for words presented in either single-talker or multiple-talker blocks. Talkers were either famous (the last five Presidents of the United States of America) or non-famous (other male politicians of similar ages). Participants either received no information about the talkers before the word recognition task (Experiments 1 and 3) or heard the talkers and saw their names first (Experiment 2). As expected, responses were faster in the single-talker blocks than in the multiple-talker blocks. Famous voices elicited faster responses in Experiment 1, but familiarity effects were extinguished in Experiment 2, possibly by hearing all voices recently before the experiment. When talkers were counterbalanced across single-talker and mixed-talker blocks in Experiment 3, no familiarity effects were observed. Predictions of familiarity facilitating talker adaptation (smaller increase in response times across single- and multiple-talker blocks for famous voices) were not confirmed. Thus, talker familiarity might not augment adaptation to a consistent talker.