Speech Science Forum -- Harriet Smith

Understanding speech in the presence of competing talkers is challenging, particularly for listeners with hearing loss, and this challenge cannot be solved by amplification. However, for listeners without hearing loss, familiarity with a speaker’s voice can support successful speech perception in these situations. This talk will discuss several projects that investigate how training listeners to recognise new voices affects speech-in-speech perception. The first examines whether listeners benefit from varied training materials when learning to recognise and understand a voice, with a specific focus on pitch variability. Another project investigates whether voice training can reduce listening effort, using self-report and pupillometry methods. Finally, I will discuss work in progress, including a study assessing the longer-term duration of voice familiarity benefits, and studies that compare how individuals with and without hearing loss use voice familiarity, spatial attention and semantic cues to understand speech-in-speech.