Speech recognition is harder when communicating with multiple talkers. This “talker variability effect” has not been extensively examined for cochlear implant (CI) users, who have difficulty discriminating same-gender talkers but not different-gender talkers. A shadowing task was conducted with normal hearing listeners (N=19) under CI simulation. The test consisted of a single-talker condition (ST), and two multi-talker conditions with different male and female voices (MT-M) or only different female voices (MT-F). Response times were longer and accuracy was lower in MT-M compared to MT-F. Thus, the talker variability effect was observed only when talkers were perceptible under CI simulation
