The effect of talker and token variability on speech perception has engendered a great deal of research. However, most of this research has compared listener performance in multiple-talker (or variable) situations to performance in single-talker conditions. It remains unclear to what extent listeners are affected by the degree of variability within a talker, rather than simply the existence of variability (being in a multitalker environment). The present study has two goals: First, the degree of variability among speakers in their /s/ and /S/ productions was measured. Even among a relatively small pool of talkers, there was a range of speech variability: some talkers had /s/ and /S/ categories that were quite distinct from one another in terms of frication centroid and skewness, while other speakers had categories that actually overlapped one another. The second goal was to examine whether this degree of variability within a talker influenced perception. Listeners were presented with natural /s/ and /S/ tokens for identification, under ideal listening conditions, and slower response times were found for speakers whose productions were more variable than for speakers with more internal consistency in their speech. This suggests that the degree of variability, not just the existence of it, may be the more critical factor in perception.
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