Abstract
When 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. 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 familiar and unfamiliar task-irrelevant talkers. The students made more errors when the task-irrelevant sentence was produced by the familiar compared to the unfamiliar talker. There was evidence for the absence of this effect in a second group of listeners — that is, family members and friends (N=20) who had known either one of the two talkers for more than ten years. While familiarity with an attended talker benefits speech comprehension, our findings indicate that familiarity with an ignored talker deteriorates working memory for target speech. The absence of this effect for family members and friends suggests that the degree of talker familiarity modulates distraction by irrelevant speech.
