Transfer of Talker-Familiarity Effects

Familiarity with a talker facilitates perception for both heard speech (where speech from a familiar talker is better identified in noise) and for visual speech (where familiarity with a talker’s face assists visual speech recognition). Recently, it has even been shown that the talker familiarity effect can be produced cross modally, i.e., experience in speech-reading a talker facilitates performance on a SPeech-In-Noise (SPIN) task. The current study examined within and across modal speaker familiarity effects with short-term familiarity training and test of transfer to SPIN performance from auditory only (AO), visual only (VO) and Auditory-visual (AV) exposure. The results showed that there was transfer from AO and VO talker familiarization, but not from AV speech. The results are discussed in terms of how the familiarity effect might be sensitive to the degree of bottom-up attention initially paid to a talker’s speech.