Speech-on-speech masking with variable access to the linguistic content of the masker speech

Abstract

It has been reported that listeners can benefit from a release in masking when the masker speech is spoken in a language that differs from the target speech compared to when the target and masker speech are spoken in the same language [Freyman, R. L. et al. (1999). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 106, 3578-3588; Van Engen, K., and Bradlow, A. (2007), J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 121, 519-526]. It is unclear whether listeners benefit from this release in masking due to the lack of linguistic interference of the masker speech, from acoustic and phonetic differences between the target and masker languages, or a combination of these differences. In the following series of experiments, listeners' sentence recognition was evaluated using speech and noise maskers that varied in the amount of linguistic content, including native-English, Mandarin-accented English, and Mandarin speech. Results from three experiments indicated that the majority of differences observed between the linguistic maskers could be explained by spectral differences between the masker conditions. However, when the recognition task increased in difficulty, i.e., at a more challenging signal-to-noise ratio, a greater decrease in performance was observed for the maskers with more linguistically relevant information than what could be explained by spectral differences alone.

Lexical influences on competing speech perception in younger, middle-aged, and older adults

“…There is evidence that unattended speech is processed at least to some extent linguistically (e.g., Cherry, 1953). This linguistic processing of unattended speech impacts the processing of the to-be-attended speech stream (e.g., Brungart et al, 2001;Carhart et al, 1969;Freyman et al, 1999), as understandable maskers influence the recognition of to-be-attended speech more than speech maskers that are not understandable (e.g., Calandruccio et al, 2010;Freyman et al, 1999;Van Engen and Bradlow, 2007). This raises the possibility that to-beignored (i.e., masker) words could compete for recognition with the words in the to-be-attended (i.e., target) speech stream, therefore interfering with their recognition.…”

Lexical decision task on French target words: Effect of listeners’ knowledge of the babble-language

“…Numerous studies on speech-in-speech perception have shown that the intelligibility of the target speech is further reduced when the background speech is produced in a known language rather than when it is spoken in an unknown language (Van Engen and Bradlow, 2007;Calandruccio et al, 2010aCalandruccio et al, , 2010bBrouwer et al, 2012;Gautreau et al, 2013) (see Table 1). For example, Van http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2015.02.004 0167-6393/Ó 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.…”

“…For instance, Calandruccio et al (2010a) manipulated the degree of signal intelligibility within 5 different types of babble in English and Mandarin. For this manipulation, the authors used 3 intermediate intelligibility conditions in addition to the 2 extreme conditions (English vs. Mandarin 2-talker babble) that were previously used by Van Engen and Bradlow (2007).…”

Assessing cognitive spare capacity as a measure of listening effort using the Auditory Inference Span Test

“…However, if the masking speech is not in the same native language as the target speech (Ng et al, 2014), and if the nonnative language is linguistically dissimilar the masking effect becomes less pronounced (Brouwer et al, 2012). Two languages that belong to the same language family, will be more alike because these languages will have similar temporal and spectral properties (Calandruccio, Dhar, & Bradlow, 2010). It is also of importance if the speaker of the signal and the speaker of the masker are of the same sex, since male and female voices are less confusable (Freyman, Balakrishnan, & Helfer, 2004).…”