Voice-Language Cues in Speech Comprehension

Voice familiarity has a powerful effect on speech comprehension, improving both intelligibility and recall. Speaker consistency also benefits speech comprehension with better recall for words spoken by one versus multiple speakers. The goal of the present study was to test the hypothesis that the benefits of voice familiarity for bilinguals depend on the consistency between a familiarized voice and the language of production, with improved perception for words when the speaker produces in the same language versus in a different language. Highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals performed a speech-in-noise transcription task. During a familiarization phase, participants listened to brief utterances in both English and Spanish that were either produced by the same voice or each produced by a different voice. This was followed by a test phase in which they listened to individual words presented in speech-shaped noise and typed in the word they heard. At test, the initial voice-language pairing was either kept consistent or inconsistent - one-voice condition words were produced by a novel voice and two-voice condition words had the voice-language pairing swapped. Consistent with the central hypothesis, transcription accuracy was significantly lower in the two-voice conditions when the language pairing was swapped relative to when it was kept consistent.