Stimulus factors influencing spatial release from speech-on-speech masking

Kidd, Gerald; Mason, Christine R.; Best, Virginia; Marrone, Nicole

doi:10.1121/1.3478781

Cited by 88 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…For example, in the Kidd et al (2008b) study mentioned previously that used the same five-word strings as in the current study, large differences were found in performance for time-reversed maskers compared to time-forward maskers with both interfering more than noise. Other studies reporting large differences due to time-reversal of speech include Freyman et al (1999), Marrone et al (2008), Kidd et al (2010) and Best et al (2012). And, at an even lower level of target-masker complexity, Uslar et al (2013) found small effects of the linguistic complexity of target sentence construction on speech reception thresholds measured in unmasked or steady-state noise masking conditions but significantly larger effects when the noise was envelope modulated.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of syntax in maintaining the integrity of streams of speech

Kidd

Mason

Best

2014

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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This study examined the ability of listeners to utilize syntactic structure to extract a target stream of speech from among competing sounds. Target talkers were identified by voice or location, which was held constant throughout a test utterance, and paired with correct or incorrect (random word order) target sentence syntax. Both voice and location provided reliable cues for identifying target speech even when other features varied unpredictably. The target sentences were masked either by predominantly energetic maskers (noise bursts) or by predominantly informational maskers (similar speech in random word order). When the maskers were noise bursts, target sentence syntax had relatively minor effects on identification performance. However, when the maskers were other talkers, correct target sentence syntax resulted in significantly better speech identification performance than incorrect syntax. Furthermore, conformance to correct syntax alone was sufficient to accurately identify the target speech. The results were interpreted as supporting the idea that the predictability of the elements comprising streams of speech, as manifested by syntactic structure, is an important factor in binding words together into coherent streams. Furthermore, these findings suggest that predictability is particularly important for maintaining the coherence of an auditory stream over time under conditions high in informational masking.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of syntax in maintaining the integrity of streams of speech

Kidd

Mason

Best

2014

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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“…Benefit from spatial cues can also be measured as the difference in the target level needed for the target to be accurately identified. Measured this way, ITD can provide "spatial release from masking" (SRM) of anywhere from several dB to tens of dB (e.g., see Edmonds and Culling, 2005;Kidd et al, 2010). An ITD benefit is typically obtained even with speech filtered into low-or highfrequency bands, indicating that both conventional lowfrequency ITD as well as high-frequency envelope ITD can contribute to SRM (Edmonds and Culling, 2005;Kidd et al, 2010).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Measured this way, ITD can provide "spatial release from masking" (SRM) of anywhere from several dB to tens of dB (e.g., see Edmonds and Culling, 2005;Kidd et al, 2010). An ITD benefit is typically obtained even with speech filtered into low-or highfrequency bands, indicating that both conventional lowfrequency ITD as well as high-frequency envelope ITD can contribute to SRM (Edmonds and Culling, 2005;Kidd et al, 2010). Differences in the tasks used in such studies as well as the different metrics used to measure performance make it difficult to quantitatively compare the effects seen in previous studies to those reported here.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We focus exclusively on the role of ITDs, assessing their influence on both the perception of segregation (i.e., whether listeners hear multiple auditory objects when presented with a mixture of sound sources) and the perceived acoustic content of the resulting perceptual tokens. Although natural listening conditions often produce ILDs as well as ITDs, ITDs alone are sufficient to support the localization of complex sounds, and on their own can enhance speech intelligibility in complex mixtures Edmonds and Culling, 2005;Gallun et al, 2005;Kidd et al, 2010;Best et al, 2006;. We restricted our investigations to ITDs in part because they could be cleanly manipulated without altering other factors (e.g., the relative levels of the sounds from different sources) that might affect performance on tasks assessing grouping even if they do not directly impact grouping itself.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Spatial cues alone produce inaccurate sound segregation: The effect of interaural time differences

Schwartz¹,

McDermott

Shinn‐Cunningham

2012

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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To clarify the role of spatial cues in sound segregation, this study explored whether interaural time differences (ITDs) are sufficient to allow listeners to identify a novel sound source from a mixture of sources. Listeners heard mixtures of two synthetic sounds, a target and distractor, each of which possessed naturalistic spectrotemporal correlations but otherwise lacked strong grouping cues, and which contained either the same or different ITDs. When the task was to judge whether a probe sound matched a source in the preceding mixture, performance improved greatly when the same target was presented repeatedly across distinct distractors, consistent with previous results. In contrast, performance improved only slightly with ITD separation of target and distractor, even when spectrotemporal overlap between target and distractor was reduced. However, when subjects localized, rather than identified, the sources in the mixture, sources with different ITDs were reported as two sources at distinct and accurately identified locations. ITDs alone thus enable listeners to perceptually segregate mixtures of sources, but the perceived content of these sources is inaccurate when other segregation cues, such as harmonicity and common onsets and offsets, do not also promote proper source separation.

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“…It was shown that the use of better-ear glimpses cannot fully explain SI if the task produces high informational masking (Best et al 2015;Glyde et al 2013). Moreover, Kidd et al (2010) determined SI in a symmetric speech masker configuration similar to Marrone et al (2008), when all signals where either unfiltered or filtered into low-, midor high-frequency regions. The authors showed that SRM was highest for the unfiltered broadband condition, but the filtered conditions lead to a reduced but still considerable SRM (between 5 and 7 dB), indicating that there may be other factors than better-ear glimpses influencing SI in a multi-talker environment.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Binaural Glimpses at the Cocktail Party?

Lingner

Grothe

Wiegrebe

et al. 2016

JARO

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Humans often have to focus on a single target sound while ignoring competing maskers in everyday situations. In such conditions, speech intelligibility (SI) is improved when a target speaker is spatially separated from a masker (spatial release from making, SRM) compared to situations where both are co-located. Such asymmetric spatial configurations lead to a 'better-ear effect' with improved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at one ear. However, maskers often surround the listener leading to more symmetric configurations where better-ear effects are absent in a long-term, wideband sense. Nevertheless, better-ear glimpses distributed across time and frequency persist and were suggested to account for SRM (Brungart and Iyer 2012). Here, speech reception was assessed using symmetric masker configurations while varying the spatio-temporal distribution of potential better-ear glimpses. Listeners were presented with a frontal target and eight single-talker maskers in four different symmetrical spatial configurations. Compared to the reference condition with colocated target and maskers, an SRM of up to 6 dB was observed. The SRM persisted when the frequency range of the maskers above or below 1500 Hz was replaced with stationary speech-shaped noise. Comparison to a recent short-time binaural SI model showed that betterear glimpses can account for half the observed SRM, while binaural interaction utilizing phase differences is required to explain the other half.

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Stimulus factors influencing spatial release from speech-on-speech masking

Cited by 88 publications

References 65 publications

The role of syntax in maintaining the integrity of streams of speech

The role of syntax in maintaining the integrity of streams of speech

Spatial cues alone produce inaccurate sound segregation: The effect of interaural time differences

Binaural Glimpses at the Cocktail Party?

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