Working-memory disruption by task-irrelevant talkers depends on degree of talker familiarity

Abstract

23When listening, familiarity with an attended talker's voice improves speech 24 comprehension. Here, we instead investigated the effect of familiarity with a distracting 25 talker. In an irrelevant-speech task, we assessed listeners' working memory for the serial 26 order of spoken digits when a task-irrelevant, distracting sentence was produced by either 27 a familiar or an unfamiliar talker. We tested two groups of listeners using the same