Familiar voices attenuate the effects of cognitive load during competing speech

When masked by speech, utterances spoken by a familiar voice are more intelligible than those in a novel voice (the “familiar-voice benefit”), and may also be less cognitively demanding to attend to. If so, a concurrent task should disrupt speech perception less when the attended voice is familiar than when it is novel. Participants (N=30) listened to masked sentences in familiar or novel voices, while tracking four moving dots on a screen (dual task) or ignoring the visual display (single task), and reported target words after each trial. Word report was highest when the target was familiar, lowest when the masker was familiar, and intermediate when both were novel. The dual task reduced intelligibility more for novel than for familiar voices but did not increase the familiar-voice benefit. Familiar voices appear to bias attention and require fewer cognitive resources to process.