Masking release due to linguistic and phonetic dissimilarity between the target and masker speech

Purpose: To investigate masking release for speech maskers for linguistically and phonetically close (English and Dutch) and distant (English and Mandarin) language pairs. Method: Thirty-two monolingual speakers of English with normal audiometric thresholds participated in the study. Data are reported for an English sentence recognition task in English and for Dutch and Mandarin competing speech maskers (Experiment 1) and noise maskers (Experiment 2) that were matched either to the long-term average speech spectra or to the temporal modulations of the speech maskers from Experiment 1. Results: Listener performance increased as the target-tomasker linguistic distance increased (English-in-English < English-in-Dutch < English-in-Mandarin). Conclusion: Spectral differences between maskers can account for some, but not all, of the variation in performance between maskers; however, temporal differences did not seem to play a significant role

Linguistic contributions to speech-on-speech masking for native and non-native listeners. Language familiarity and semantic content

Contains fulltext : 159282.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)17 augustus 201116 p

Linguistic masking in speech perception under adverse conditions

Speech recognition in the presence of background speech is challenged by a combination of energetic/peripheral and informational/central masking. Energetic masking is related to target audibility. Informational masking depends on linguistic, attentional, and cognitive factors (Cooke, García-Lecumberri, & Barker, 2008). We explored the linguistic component of informational masking by having English and Dutch listeners recognize English and/or Dutch sentences embedded in two-talker babble at different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). The babble was in either the same language (e.g., English-in-English), a typologically close language (e.g., English- in-Dutch), or a typologically distant language (e.g., English-in-Mandarin). We also compared recognition accuracy in babble consisting of either meaningful or semantically anomalous sentences. The results provide insight into how bottom-up perceptual processes (indexed by variation in energetic masking from different SNRs) interact with top-down learning and categorization mechanisms (indexed by variation in linguistic masking from different listener-,language- and content-related characteristics) for speech perception under adverse conditions

Spectral weights for sample discrimination as a function of overall level1

Doherty and Lutfi [(1996). “Spectral weights for overall level discrimination in listeners with sensorineural hearing loss,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 99, 1053–1058] examined the weights assigned to individual components of a six-tone complex during a sample discrimination task and reported that hearing-impaired subjects gave the most weight to components in the region of their high-frequency hearing loss. In contrast, weighting patterns varied for normal-hearing subjects. In the current study, the same six-tone complex, comprised of the octave frequencies from 0.25 to 8 kHz, was presented to three subjects with normal hearing in high-pass noise, in low-pass noise, and in quiet at two overall levels. Consistent with Doherty and Lutfi, subjects assigned more weight to the 4-kHz component in the high-pass noise condition, but roughly equal weight to all components in the lower-level quiet condition. Weights in the low-pass noise and higher-level quiet conditions, however, were similar to those in the high-pass noise condition. A second experiment compared weights for seven subjects in quiet at four different mean levels. Weights for the highest-frequency components increased as the overall level of the complexes was increased. These results suggest that overall level, rather than degree of hearing loss or sensation level, was the primary cause of the effect that Doherty and Lutfi observed