Energetic Masking and Masking Release

Culling, John F.; Stone, Michael

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-51662-2_3

Cited by 29 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 76 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This is because the noise masker condition produces the highest proportion of EM of all of the conditions tested (e.g., review in Kidd et al, 2008b;cf. related in Schubotz et al, 2016;Culling and Stone, 2017). Although the thresholds for the SNHL listener group were higher than those for the NH listener group for the noise masker, consistent with the prediction of greater EM (e.g., Arbogast et al, 2005;Best et al, 2013a), the difference (4.4 dB) was considerably less than the difference between groups found for the speech masking conditions, especially the masking release conditions for the 2-talker masker (e.g., 12.2 dB for the reversed speech masker).…”

Section: Energetic Maskingmentioning

confidence: 83%

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

Kidd

Mason

Best

et al. 2019

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Energetic Maskingmentioning

confidence: 83%

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

Kidd

Mason

Best

et al. 2019

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…One reason that speech-on-speech testing may be more indicative of real-world challenges in noisy environments, and therefore potentially beneficial to clinical assessment, is that this type of listening scenario causes both energetic and informational masking (Carlile, 2014). Energetic masking describes the degradation of signal encoding in the auditory periphery as a consequence of peripheral responses to the masker (Culling and Stone, 2017). In contrast, informational masking describes degradation in the central representation a) Electronic mail: lauren.calandruccio@case.edu of the signal, due to a limited ability to segregate the target from the masker, and selectively attend to the signal (e.g., Billig et al, 2013;Bregman, 1990;Kidd and Colburn, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does the semantic content or syntactic regularity of masker speech affect speech-on-speech recognition?

Calandruccio

Buss

Bencheck

et al. 2018

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Speech-on-speech recognition differs substantially across stimuli, but it is unclear what role linguistic features of the masker play in this variability. The linguistic similarity hypothesis suggests similarity between sentence-level semantic content of the target and masker speech increases masking. Sentence recognition in a two-talker masker was evaluated with respect to semantic content and syntactic structure of the masker (experiment 1) and linguistic similarity of the target and masker (experiment 2). Target and masker sentences were semantically meaningful or anomalous. Masker syntax was varied or the same across sentences. When other linguistic features of the masker were controlled, variability in syntactic structure across masker tokens was only relevant when the masker was played continuously (as opposed to gated); when played continuously, sentencerecognition thresholds were poorer with variable than consistent masker syntax, but this effect was small (0.5 dB). When the syntactic structure of the masker was held constant, semantic meaningfulness of the masker did not increase masking, and at times performance was better for the meaningful than the anomalous masker. These data indicate that sentence-level semantic content of the masker speech does not influence speech-on-speech masking. Further, no evidence that similarities between target/masker sentence-level semantic content increases masking was found.

show abstract

“…It leaves a minimum number of glimpsing opportunities without creating confusion due to its lack of similarity to speech. As binaural masking release is often associated with a release from energetic masking (Culling & Stone, ), binaural masking release is more likely to play an important role in the spatial benefit. The significant difference in SRTs that was observed between the HRTF and ISE conditions may be an indication that binaural masking release did play a role for this masker type.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contribution of binaural masking release to improved speech intelligibility for different masker types

Sutojo

Par

Schoenmaker

2018

Eur J of Neuroscience

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In situations with competing talkers or in the presence of masking noise, speech intelligibility can be improved by spatially separating the target speaker from the interferers. This advantage is generally referred to as spatial release from masking, and different mechanisms have been suggested to explain it. One proposed mechanism to benefit from spatial cues is the binaural masking release, which is purely stimulus-driven. According to this mechanism, the spatial benefit results from differences in the binaural cues of target and masker, which need to appear simultaneously in time and frequency to improve the signal detection. In an alternative proposed mechanism, the differences in the interaural cues improve the segregation of auditory streams, a process, which involves top-down processing rather than being purely stimulus-driven. Other than the cues that produce binaural masking release, the interaural cue differences between target and interferer required to improve stream segregation do not have to appear simultaneously in time and frequency. This study is concerned with the contribution of binaural masking release to spatial release from masking for three masker types that differ with respect to the amount of energetic masking they exert. Speech intelligibility was measured, employing a stimulus manipulation that inhibits binaural masking release and analysed with a metric to account for the number of better-ear glimpses. Results indicate that the contribution of the stimulus-driven binaural masking release plays a minor role while binaural stream segregation and the availability of glimpses in the better ear had a stronger influence on improving the speech intelligibility.

show abstract

Energetic Masking and Masking Release

Cited by 29 publications

References 76 publications

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

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

Does the semantic content or syntactic regularity of masker speech affect speech-on-speech recognition?

Contribution of binaural masking release to improved speech intelligibility for different masker types

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About