Foreign language talker identification does not generalize to new talkers.

Abstract

Listeners identify talkers less accurately in a foreign language than in their native language, but it remains unclear whether this language-familiarity effect arises because listeners (1) simply lack experience identifying foreign-language talkers or (2) gain access to additional talker-specific information during concurrent linguistic processing of talkers' speech. Here, we tested whether sustained practice identifying talkers of an unfamiliar, foreign language could lead to generalizable improvement in learning to identify new talkers speaking that language, even if listeners remained unable to understand the talkers' speech. English-speaking adults with no prior experience with Mandarin practiced learning to identify Mandarin-speaking talkers over four consecutive days and were tested on their ability to generalize their Mandarin talker-identification abilities to new Mandarin-speaking talkers on the fourth day. In a "same-voices" training condition, listeners learned to identify the same talkers for the first 3 days and new talkers on the fourth day; in a "different-voices" condition, listeners learned to identify a different set of voices on each day including the fourth day. Listeners in the same-voices condition showed daily improvement in talker identification across the first 3 days but returned to baseline when trying to learn new talkers on the fourth day, whereas listeners in the different-voices condition showed no improvement across the 4 days. After 4 days, neither group demonstrated generalized improvement in learning new Mandarin-speaking talkers versus their baseline performance. These results suggest that, in the absence of specific linguistic knowledge, listeners are unable to develop generalizable foreign-language talker-identification abilities.