Speaker
Description
Recognition of familiar individuals relies on information from multiple sensory-modalities, including faces and voices. Existing person-recognition frameworks propose that face and voice processing initially occur through separate modality-specific pathways before converging at a modality-independent identity stage. While cross-modal identity processing is known to facilitate person recognition, its broader perceptual consequences remain less well understood. One important example is the familiar-talker benefit, whereby speech from familiar individuals is more intelligible in noisy environments than speech from unfamiliar individuals. In the present study, we investigated whether this familiarity benefit extends to celebrity voices and whether cross-modal identity priming enhances speech perception in noise. Participants listened to speech produced by familiar celebrity talkers and unfamiliar voices under noisy listening conditions. We additionally examined whether presenting identity cues, including a person’s face and name, before speech onset modulated intelligibility. Our findings demonstrate that celebrity familiarity produces a measurable speech-in-noise advantage, indicating that relatively sparse but repeated exposure to famous voices is sufficient to generate perceptual benefits. Importantly, the familiarity advantage was strongest early in the sentence, suggesting that listeners rapidly exploit stored knowledge about familiar vocal characteristics during speech processing. We also found that identity priming, through faces and names, enhanced this benefit, supporting the idea that cross-modal person representations can influence auditory perception prior to speech onset. These findings suggest that seeing a familiar individual may prime neural representations of their voice, preparing the auditory system to process expected vocal statistics. More broadly, the results extend models of person recognition by demonstrating that shared identity representations can influence perceptual processing beyond recognition alone.