Does Familiarity with a Talker\u27s Voice Facilitate Speech in Noise?

Research shows that a listener’s familiarity with a talker makes them more understandable in background noise (Ambercrombie, 1967; Martin, Millennix, Pisoni, & Summers, 1989; Goggin, Thompson, Strube, & Simental, 1991), and aids in glimpsing (Cooke, 2006). However, we don’t know if familiarity is facilitative or detrimental in natural listening tasks. The aim of our study was to determine whether or not a listener’s familiarity with a talker improves intelligibility in the presence of complex, ecologically valid background noise. We used a yoked design with talker familiarity as the independent variable (familiar professor, novel professor) and Key word accuracy was the dependent variable. Talker familiarity was manipulated, the participants listened to a recording of the talker (novel or familiar) reading in a normal voice Harvard sentences, low probability sentences, while background noise played (background noise and cafeteria noise) tested at -4dB and -6.5 dB. These conditions were counterbalanced across participants. Predicted results are those familiar with the talker will find the talker more intelligible than those in the novel voice condition. It is also expected that participants will score better in the restaurant background noise due to increased opportunities to glimpse