Short-term implicit voice-learning leads to a Familiar Talker Advantage: The role of encoding specificity

Whereas previous research has found that a Familiar Talker Advantage—better spoken language perception for familiar voices—occurs following explicit voice-learning, Case, Seyfarth, and Levi [(2018). J. Speech, Lang., Hear. Res. 61(5), 1251–1260] failed to find this effect after implicit voice-learning. To test whether the advantage is limited to explicit voice-learning, a follow-up experiment evaluated implicit voice-learning under more similar encoding (training) and retrieval (test) conditions. Sentence recognition in noise improved significantly more for familiar than unfamiliar talkers, suggesting that short-term implicit voice-learning can lead to a Familiar Talker Advantage. This paper explores how similarity in encoding and retrieval conditions might affect the acquired processing advantage.