Is speech processing faster for familiar talkers?

When listening to speech, intelligibility (measured as percent words or phonemes correct) is increased for familiar talkers, both for talkers who are naturally familiar with the listener and for talkers who become familiar through lab-based training. These findings are robust and have been shown for individual words and sentences and for younger and older listeners. In the current study, we test the extent to which talker familiarity affects speech processing time. Listeners are familiarized with three talkers in a talker identification task. To test differences in processing speech, listeners then complete a lexical decision task with both familiarized and unfamiliar speakers. We predict that listeners will be faster at making lexical decisions for familiar speakers compared to unfamiliar speakers. Data collection is ongoing and results of this study will inform how talker familiarity impacts processing more broadly speaking.