Swinging at a Cocktail Party

Abstract

People often have to listen to someone speak in the presence of competing voices. Much is known about the acoustic cues used to overcome this challenge, but almost nothing is known about the utility of cues derived from experience with particular voices—cues that may be particularly important for older people and others with impaired hearing. Here, we use a version of the coordinate-response-measure procedure to show that people can exploit knowledge of a highly familiar voice (their spouse’s) not only to track it better in the presence of an interfering stranger’s voice, but also, crucially, to ignore it so as to comprehend a stranger’s voice more effectively. Although performance declines with increasing age when the target voice is novel, there is no decline when the target voice belongs to the listener’s spouse. This finding indicates that older listeners can exploit their familiarity with a speaker’s voice to mitigate the effects of sensory and cognitive decline.

Talker and background noise specificity in spoken word recognition memory

“…This indexical specificity effect, where linguistic processing is influenced by instance-specific information, has been found across a variety of different tasks, including continuous recognition memory Palmeri et al, 1993), delayed recognition memory (Goh, 2005;Goldinger, 1996;Mattys & Liss, 2008), cued re-call (Church & Schacter, 1994), long-term repetition priming, and lexical decision (González & McLennan, 2007;McLennan & Luce, 2005). Moreover, perceptual experience with a talker's voice characteristics has been found to transfer to enhanced linguistic processing, with higher shadowing or word recognition accuracy for familiar talkers relative to unfamiliar ones (Johnsrude et al, 2013;Newman & Evers, 2007;Nygaard & Pisoni, 1998).…”

“…A strict version of this notion has been challenged by a burgeoning body of evidence over the past couple of decades demonstrating that linguistic processing is influenced by non-linguistic features of the speech signal, that is, by indexical information, including gender, talker identity, speaking rate, and the speaker's affective state (e.g., Goh, 2005;Goldinger, 1996;Johnsrude et al, 2013;Kaganovich et al, 2006;Mullennix & Pisoni, 1990;Palmeri et al, 1993;Schacter & Church, 1992;Sheffert & Fowler, 1995, and many others). This work has demonstrated that listeners are sensitive to changes in the indexical features of the input, such that listeners were found to be less accurate at identifying or recalling items when the surface characteristics changed from their initial exposure to the items relative to when the surface characteristics remained consistent.…”

The cocktail-party problem revisited: early processing and selection of multi-talker speech

“…As shown by Helfer and Freyman (2009), who used a speech perception task similar to the CRM task, results did not depend on whether the target talker could be identified using a key word presented visually, or using an auditory “preview” of the target talker’s voice. Interestingly, Johnsrude et al (2013) recently showed that listeners are much better at suppressing same-sex confusions when the target or interfering talker is highly familiar (the listener’s spouse).…”

Age-Related Changes in Objective and Subjective Speech Perception in Complex Listening Environments

“…However, age and/or age-related hearing loss appears to reduce the ability to take advantage of these fluctuations (Dubno, Horwitz, & Ahlstrom, 2002George, Festen, & Houtgast, 2006;Summers & Molis, 2004;Takahashi & Bacon, 1992). There is also evidence that older adults are less able to use indexical information, such as the differences between voices (Helfer & Freyman, 2008;Johnsrude et al, 2013; NavehBenjamin & Craik, 1996;Pilotti & Beyer, 2002; RossiKatz & Arehart, 2009;Yonan & Sommers, 2000), which is likely important when trying to identify and attend to one message in the presence of competing talkers.When multiple talkers are present simultaneously in realworld acoustic environments, a particularly salient cue in segregating individual speech streams is the physical point of origin of each voice within that environment (due to the fact that every person occupies his or her own location in space). An essential consideration when examining listening in such competing speech situations is the extent to which the listener can take advantage of spatial separation between the target and masking speech.…”

“…However, age and/or age-related hearing loss appears to reduce the ability to take advantage of these fluctuations (Dubno, Horwitz, & Ahlstrom, 2002George, Festen, & Houtgast, 2006;Summers & Molis, 2004;Takahashi & Bacon, 1992). There is also evidence that older adults are less able to use indexical information, such as the differences between voices (Helfer & Freyman, 2008;Johnsrude et al, 2013;NavehBenjamin & Craik, 1996;Pilotti & Beyer, 2002;RossiKatz & Arehart, 2009;Yonan & Sommers, 2000), which is likely important when trying to identify and attend to one message in the presence of competing talkers.…”