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Speech spoken by familiar people is more resistant to interference by linguistically similar speech

Understanding speech in adverse conditions is affected by experience—a familiar voice is substantially more intelligible than an unfamiliar voice when competing speech is present, even if the content of the speech (the words) are controlled. This familiar-voice benefit is observed consistently, but its underpinnings are unclear: Do familiar voices simply attract more attention, are they inherently more intelligible because they have predictable acoustic characteristics, or are they more intelligible in a mixture because they are more resistant to interference from other sounds? We recruited pairs of native English participants who were friends or romantic couples. Participants reported words from closed-set English sentences (Oldenburg matrix test; HörTech, 2014) spoken by a familiar talker (the participant’s partner) or an unfamiliar talker. We compared three masker conditions that are acoustically similar but differ in their demands: (1) English Oldenburg sentences; (2) Oldenburg sentences in a language incomprehensible to the listener (Russian or Spanish); and (3) unintelligible signal-correlated noise. We adaptively varied the target-to-masker ratio to obtain 50% speech reception thresholds. We observed a large (~5 dB) familiar-voice benefit when the target and masker were both English sentences. This benefit was attenuated (to ~2 dB) when the masker was in an incomprehensible language and disappeared when it was signal-correlated noise. These results suggest that familiar voices did not benefit intelligibility because they were more predictable or because they attracted greater attention; rather, familiarity with a target voice reduced interference from maskers that are linguistically similar to the target.