| Previous research suggests that as listeners become familiar with a speaker's vocal style, they are better able to understand that speaker. This study investigated one possible mechanism by which this talker familiarity benefit arises. Listeners' vowel spaces were measured using a perceptual discrimination test both before and after they were trained to identify a group of speakers by name. Listeners identified either the same speakers whose vowels they discriminated or a different group of speakers. Differences in the learnability and the intelligibility of the two speaking groups were observed. The speaker group that was harder to identify also had vowels that were harder to discriminate. Changes in the listeners' vowel spaces were determined by examining multidimensional scaling solutions of their responses during the discrimination tests. All listeners became better at discriminating vowels. However, the listeners who heard different speakers during identification training and vowel discrimination shifted their vowel spaces after training. This suggests that encountering new voices in an unrelated, non-linguistic task acts as a change in context and affects linguistic representations. Together these results suggest a link between linguistic and non-linguistic information in representations for spoken language. |
