The effect of speaker variability on phoneme processing: A gamified crowd-science experiment

Listeners can effortlessly understand speech from any speaker, which is remarkable given the enormous acoustic variability and lack of invariant features corresponding to phonemes across speakers. Recently, it has been proposed that listeners use voice information to adapt to speakers (Kleinschmidt & Jaeger, 2015), which would reduce acoustic variability and explain why listeners can understand speech robustly from different speakers. In this talk, we will discuss a study in which we investigate whether adult listeners rely on voice information to adapt to speakers by testing the effect of speaker variability on phoneme processing. Specifically, we will examine whether there is a processing cost for listening to multiple speakers as compared to a single speaker. Given that listeners effortlessly understand different speakers, we will use a crowd-science approach to increase our sample-size to capture potentially subtle effects of speaker variability on phoneme processing. The experiment will be gamified in order to keep participants’ attention. We will present the experimental design, along with the conceptualization of the game