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

Abstract

When one is listening, familiarity with an attended talker's voice improves speech comprehension. Here, we instead investigated the effect of familiarity with a distracting talker. In an irrelevant-speech task, we assessed listeners' working memory for the serial order of spoken digits when a task-irrelevant, distracting sentence was produced by either a familiar or an unfamiliar talker (with rare omissions of the task-irrelevant sentence). We tested two groups of listeners using the same experimental procedure. The first group were undergraduate psychology students (N = 66) who had attended an introductory statistics course. Critically, each student had been taught by one of two course instructors, whose voices served as the familiar and unfamiliar task-irrelevant talkers. The second group of listeners were family members and friends (N = 20) who had known either one of the two talkers for more than 10 years. Students, but not family members and friends, made more errors when the task-irrelevant talker was familiar versus unfamiliar. Interestingly, the effect of talker familiarity was not modulated by the presence of task-irrelevant speech: Students experienced stronger working memory disruption by a familiar talker, irrespective of whether they heard a taskirrelevant sentence during memory retention or merely expected it. While previous work has shown that familiarity with an attended talker benefits speech comprehension, our findings indicate that familiarity with an ignored talker disrupts working memory for target speech. The absence of this effect in family members and friends suggests that the degree of familiarity modulates the memory disruption.

Familiarity and task context shape the use of acoustic information in voice identity perception

“…Our findings are furthermore likely to be relevant beyond voice identity perception: For example, a large body of literature suggests that voice identity perception and speech comprehension are fundamentally linked by showing enhanced intelligibility of speech produced by a familiar versus unfamiliar voice (e.g., Nygaard & Pisoni, 1998;Johnsrude et al, 2013;Kreitewolf et al, 2017;Newman & Evers, 2007). It has been recently argued that such effects of voice familiarity on speech comprehension are due to improved acoustic representations of familiar voices (Kreitewolf et al, 2019). The current findings may be compatible with this view by suggesting that familiarity indeed affects how listeners interact with the acoustic properties of voices.…”

Familiarity and task context shape the use of acoustic information in voice identity perception

“…Finally, our findings are likely to be relevant beyond voice identity perception: For example, a large body of literature suggests that voice identity perception and speech comprehension are fundamentally linked by showing enhanced intelligibility of speech produced by a familiar versus unfamiliar voice (e.g., Johnsrude et al, 2013 ; Kreitewolf et al, 2017 ; Newman & Evers, 2007 ; Nygaard & Pisoni, 1998 ). It has been recently argued that such effects of voice familiarity on speech comprehension are due to improved acoustic representations of familiar voices ( Kreitewolf, Wöstmann, Tune, Plöchl, & Obleser, 2019 ). The current findings may be compatible with this view by suggesting that familiarity indeed affects how listeners interact with the acoustic properties of voices.…”

Subdiagnosis, but not presence of vestibular symptoms, predicts balance impairment in migraine patients – a cross sectional study

“…Similar to several of our previous studies [34][35][36], we followed an iterative model-fitting procedure: Starting with the minimal model that only included the subjectspecific random intercepts, we first added fixed-and then random-effects terms in a step-wise fashion. Fixedeffect terms were added in the order of their clinical importance (i.e., diagnosis, vestibular symptoms, surface, eyes, and interactions between these factors).…”