Distinguished speaker: Ingrid Johnsrude (Western University)

Title: The benefit to speech perception of hearing a familiar talker

Abstract: People often have to listen to someone speak in the presence of competing voices. Much is known about the acoustic cues used to overcome this challenge, but almost nothing is known about the utility of cues derived from experience with particular voices—cues that may be particularly important for older people and others with impaired hearing. 

In recent work, trainees Ysabel Domingo, Emma Holmes and I have investigated the benefit to intelligibility realized when someone is listening to a person they know. We have replicated previous work demonstrating a robust benefit for the voice of a longterm spouse (Johnsrude et al, 2013) and extended it to less familiar voices.  We have also demonstrated that the acoustic features used to understand a familiar voice differ from those used to recognize a voice as familiar, indicating that the way voice information is processed depends somewhat on the perceptual goal of the listener. Finally, the benefit to intelligibility of a familiar voice depends on the type of masker used: the results suggest that the cognitive processes recruited to understand speech spoken by a familiar voice differ at least somewhat from those recruited to understand a novel voice, compatible with an episodic account of lexical access (e.g., Goldinger, 1998).

See more on Ingrid Johnsrude here.

When: Thursday, April 26, 10:00 am

Where: Room 501, Goodman Cancer Research Centre, 1160 Pine Ave W, Montreal

The room can be accessed from the McGill Life Sciences complex entrance on 3649 promenade Sir William Osler. Take the elevator to the 5th floor, when exiting the elevator turn right and walk all the way to the end of the hallway. The room can also be accessed from Pine Ave.