The benefit to speech intelligibility of hearing a familiar voice
Previous experience with a voice can help listeners understand speech when a competing talker is present. Using the Coordinate-Response Measure (CRM) task (Bolia, 2000), Johnsrude et al. (2013) demonstrated that speech is more intelligible when either the target or competing (masking) talker is a long-term spouse than when both talkers are unfamiliar (termed ‘familiar-target’ and ‘familiar-masker’ benefits, respectively). To better understand how familiarity improves intelligibility, we measured the familiar-target and familiar-masker benefits in older and younger spouses using a more challenging matrix task, and compared the benefits listeners gain from spouses’ and friends’ voices. On each trial, participants heard two sentences from the Boston University Gerald (Kidd et al., 2008) corpus (“ ”) and reported words from the sentence beginning with a target name word. A familiar-masker benefit was not observed, but all groups showed a robust familiar-target benefit and its magnitude did not differ between spouses and friends. The familiar-target benefit was not influenced by relationship length (in the range of 0.5–52 years). Together, these results suggest that the familiar-target benefit can develop from various types of relationships and that it reaches a ceiling within several months of meeting a new friend or partner.