The effect of talker familiarity on word segmentation in noise

Perceptual learning about voices is known to facilitate speech perception, but it is unclear exactly which phonetic representations are altered to cause this facilitation. This study examines perceptual learning for a non-segmental phonetic property, talker-specific cues to word boundaries. An experiment tested intelligibility in noise of sentences that contained hard-to-segment sequences (e.g. /patsɔːd/, which can correspond to Pat sawed or Pat’s awed). Testing occurred before and after training with a voice; improvement in performance after training was measured. Subjects who heard the same voice during training as during testing showed more improvement than those who heard a different voice. Implications for exemplar theories of speech perception are discussed