# Cents and shenshibility: The role of reward in talker-specific phonetic recalibration

## TL;DR

This study explores whether external rewards affect how listeners learn to understand speech patterns from different talkers.

## Contribution

The study shows that phonetic recalibration is not influenced by external rewards, highlighting its robustness.

## Key findings

- Participants did not show more learning for the high-reward talker compared to the low-reward talker.
- Lexically guided perceptual learning appears robust to domain-general influences like reward.

## Abstract

To what degree might speech perception be affected by factors external to the speech signal? Here, we consider whether listeners consider the value of individual talkers (e.g., a person that is important to the listener versus a passing stranger) when learning the idiosyncrasies of their speech, perhaps by directing their attention to the more “valuable” talker. In general, talker-specific phonetic recalibration has proven to be remarkably robust, leaving open how permeable it is to domain-general influences like attention and reward. The current study asked whether the magnitude of the talker-specific learning effect was modulated by an external reward intended to bias listeners to prioritize one talker over the other. Using an established paradigm, participants learned idiosyncratic pronunciations of the /s/ and /ʃ/ fricatives by two talkers—“Jane” and “Austin.” Over multiple experiments, participants were more likely to receive a few additional cents for one talker compared with the other following correct responses during exposure. We hypothesized that participants would show greater phonetic recalibration to the high-reward talker compared with the low-reward talker. Our results showed that participants did not show a difference in the degree of learning based on the value of each talker, suggesting that lexically guided perceptual learning is robust to external rewards. This finding opens discussions into the role of reward and attention in talker-specific phonetic recalibration, and how domain-general factors influence speech perception more broadly.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13414-025-03048-z.