Determining the energetic and informational components of speech-on-speech masking in listeners with sensorineural hearing loss

Abstract

The ability to identify the words spoken by one talker masked by two or four competing talkers was tested in young-adult listeners with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL). In a reference/baseline condition, masking speech was colocated with target speech, target and masker talkers were female, and the masker was intelligible. Three comparison conditions included replacing female masker talkers with males, time-reversal of masker speech, and spatial separation of sources. All three variables produced significant release from masking. To emulate energetic masking (EM), stimuli were subjected to ideal time-frequency segregation retaining only the time-frequency units where target energy exceeded masker energy. Subjects were then tested with these resynthesized "glimpsed stimuli." For either two or four maskers, thresholds only varied about 3 dB across conditions suggesting that EM was roughly equal. Compared to normal-hearing listeners from an earlier study [Kidd, Mason, Swaminathan, Roverud, Clayton, and Best, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 140, 132-144 (2016)], SNHL listeners demonstrated both greater energetic and informational masking as well as higher glimpsed thresholds. Individual differences were correlated across masking release conditions suggesting that listeners could be categorized according to their general ability to solve the task.

Speech perception in noise: Masking and unmasking

“…(2001) where the number of concurrent talkers was increased to four. Consistently, several later studies also reported a large masking release due to dissimilar target/masker sex ( Noble and Perrett, 2002 ; Brungart and Simpson, 2002 ; Allen et al., 2008 ; Brungart et al., 2001 , 2009 ; Cullington and Zeng 2008 ; Zekvel et al., 2014 ; Xia et al., 2015 ; Kidd et al., 2016 , 2019 ; Rennies et al., 2019 ; Zhang et al., 2020 ).…”

Influence of Three Auditory Profiles on Aided Speech Perception in Different Noise Scenarios

“…In addition, they benefit less from amplitude modulations in noise signals (Bacon et al., 1998; George et al., 2006) or from spatial separation of multiple competing signals ( Hornsby et al., 2006 ). These differences are likely due to a reduced ability to process temporal and spatial cues ( Arbogast et al., 2005 ; Johannesen et al., 2016 ; Kidd et al., 2019 ; Lőcsei et al., 2016 ). As pointed out earlier, current HA fittings focus on the pure-tone audiogram and therefore neglect suprathreshold hearing deficits.…”

Speech intelligibility and talker gender classification with noise-vocoded and tone-vocoded speech

“…The ability of listeners to reliably perceive talker gender can have important implications for speech intelligibility, particularly under speech-on-speech masking conditions. Previous studies have provided clear evidence that gender differences between target and masker talkers typically result in a substantial release from masking, allowing listeners to successfully understand target speech at significantly lower target-to-masker ratios (e.g., Brungart, 2001 ; Kidd et al , 2016 ; Kidd et al , 2019 ). Any alteration/distortion of the speech signal that renders it more difficult for a listener to distinguish talker gender deprives the listener of that powerful source segregation cue and could diminish the typical release from masking that would otherwise occur.…”