It is widely acknowledged that top-down influences such as our prior experiences, expectations and knowledge influence the way in which we perceive information. However less attention has been given to how different sources of top-down influences interact when modifying sensory information. In this study we utilized concurrent behavioral and EEG measurements to examine the main and interactive effects of two sources of expectations - informative hints (semantic priming) and stimulus repetition - in an auditory task relying on recognizing spoken words embedded in noise. We manipulated participants’ prior knowledge of the target stimuli by presenting valid, invalid and neutral hints (both acoustically and visually), and then assessed how their results differed over multiple repetition blocks. Although our results found an initial effect of informative hints, these effects were short lived and did not carry on to later repetition blocks. Contrastingly, the effect of repetition-based learning was more robust, and quantitatively overrode the effects of hint types and modalities in which they were delivered. While the interactive effects between hints and repetitions were also observed, they were not consistent across hint types and modalities. Taken together, we argue that both informative hints and stimulus repetition might utilize different learning mechanisms, both of which contribute to the perception of speech.