Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, New York University, 665 Broadway, 9th Floor, New York, New York 10012, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2011 Dec;130(6):4053-62. doi: 10.1121/1.3651816.
Previous research has shown that familiarity with a talker's voice can improve linguistic processing (herein, "Familiar Talker Advantage"), but this benefit is constrained by the context in which the talker's voice is familiar. The current study examined how familiarity affects intelligibility by manipulating the type of talker information available to listeners. One group of listeners learned to identify bilingual talkers' voices from English words, where they learned language-specific talker information. A second group of listeners learned the same talkers from German words, and thus only learned language-independent talker information. After voice training, both groups of listeners completed a word recognition task with English words produced by both familiar and unfamiliar talkers. Results revealed that English-trained listeners perceived more phonemes correct for familiar than unfamiliar talkers, while German-trained listeners did not show improved intelligibility for familiar talkers. The absence of a processing advantage in speech intelligibility for the German-trained listeners demonstrates limitations on the Familiar Talker Advantage, which crucially depends on the language context in which the talkers' voices were learned; knowledge of how a talker produces linguistically relevant contrasts in a particular language is necessary to increase speech intelligibility for words produced by familiar talkers.
先前的研究表明，对说话者声音的熟悉程度可以提高语言处理能力（此处称为“熟悉说话者优势”），但这种优势受到说话者声音熟悉的语境的限制。本研究通过操纵听众可获得的说话者信息类型来检验熟悉程度如何影响可理解度。一组听众通过英语单词学习双语说话者的声音，从而学习特定于语言的说话者信息。第二组听众通过德语单词学习相同的说话者，因此仅学习语言独立的说话者信息。在语音训练之后，两组听众都完成了一项单词识别任务，其中包括熟悉和不熟悉的说话者所发出的英语单词。结果表明，受过英语训练的听众对熟悉说话者的感知正确的音位多于不熟悉说话者，而受过德语训练的听众对熟悉说话者的感知则没有提高。对于受过德语训练的听众来说，在语音可理解度方面没有表现出处理优势，这表明“熟悉说话者优势”存在局限性，这取决于学习说话者声音的语言语境；对于熟悉说话者发出的单词，了解说话者如何在特定语言中产生与语言相关的对比是提高语音可理解度的必要条件。
