In a study conducted by Pollack and Pickett in 1964, researchers, having

previously observed that the duration of a spoken excerpt of a sentence is directly

related to intelligibility of a given word in the excerpt, tested the hypothesis that
this increase in intelligibility is partially due to an increase in exposure to the
manner in which a given speaker speaks (as opposed to just being due to an
increase in the amount of structural context presented). The findings confirmed this
hypothesis, indicating that perception of ones speech must rely on factors of their
speech that are consistent across multi-word boundaries.
Accordingly, becoming familiar with these factors for a given speaker should
enhance ones comprehension of said speakers speech at a given time. Does this
mean that it should be easier to understand someone with whom you are familiar
than it is to understand a stranger? Intuitively, one may be tempted to say that this
is indeed the case and hypothesize that there exists a connection between this
supposed phenomenon and the genuine difficulty that people experience in trying
to understand an accent that they have never before heard. Although this seems
intuitively obvious, a more reasoned analysis reveals that it is not inherently so; it is
undoubtedly possible that the aforementioned speech factors, though conserved
across multi-word boundaries, are not conserved across longer durations of time.
That is to say, a priori, one cannot logically conclude that speech factors exhibited
by a given speaker at time A will be dually manifested by the same speaker at some
later time B. Rather, I reckon that as (B-A)-> , the probability that the speech
factors manifested at A are the same as those manifested at time B tends towards
zero. One could test this hypothesis by repeating Pollack and Picketts 1964 study,
with one slight alteration: simply let the set of speakers consist of people the
participants know and people they dont know.