Unmasking for Pure Tones and Spondees: Interaural Phase and Time Disparities

Carhart, Raymond; Tillman, Tom W.; Dallos, Peter

doi:10.1044/jshr.1104.722

Cited by 16 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Those binaural factors that contribute to a listening advantage include; binaural summation [8,28,40,45], the head shadow effect [8,20,38,44,48], localization [26,27,29,35,37,41,49], and binaural release from masking [8,13,21,23,29]. Research conducted primarily with adults suggests that people with only one normally hearing ear experience a variety of listening difficulties, including difficulty in understanding speech under quiet and noisy conditions regardless of the location of the sound source [8,19,20,44].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Speech recognition abilities in noise for children with severe-to-profound unilateral hearing impairment

Ruscetta

Arjmand

Pratt

2005

International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology

105

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Speech recognition abilities in noise for children with severe-to-profound unilateral hearing impairment

Ruscetta

Arjmand

Pratt

2005

International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology

105

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“…Thus, perception fully utilizes low-level information, which is limited only by the variability of the neuronal responses at lower representation levels [32–37]. This claim is based on the ability of “ideal listener” models to account for human performance in a broad range of psychoacoustical tasks (e.g., [16,38–51]). These models usually assume two basic processing stages: a low-level neuronal representation of the input, which encapsulates all the information believed to be available at the level of the brainstem (e.g., [52]), and a subsequent decision-making stage [37], which performs statistically optimal decisions based on the full array of low-level activity [37].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The dichotic configuration maximizes phase information for separation between signal and noise [45,71]: the noise is identical in the two ears, while the signal is added with opposite phase to the two ears. The ability of listeners to use the low-level phase information was measured by the difference between dichotic and diotic thresholds (termed binaural benefit , typically in the range of 3–7 dB, e.g., [38,45,51,71–74]). Task difficulty was measured by diotic thresholds.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Low-Level Information and High-Level Perception: The Case of Speech in Noise

2008

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Auditory information is processed in a fine-to-crude hierarchical scheme, from low-level acoustic information to high-level abstract representations, such as phonological labels. We now ask whether fine acoustic information, which is not retained at high levels, can still be used to extract speech from noise. Previous theories suggested either full availability of low-level information or availability that is limited by task difficulty. We propose a third alternative, based on the Reverse Hierarchy Theory (RHT), originally derived to describe the relations between the processing hierarchy and visual perception. RHT asserts that only the higher levels of the hierarchy are immediately available for perception. Direct access to low-level information requires specific conditions, and can be achieved only at the cost of concurrent comprehension. We tested the predictions of these three views in a series of experiments in which we measured the benefits from utilizing low-level binaural information for speech perception, and compared it to that predicted from a model of the early auditory system. Only auditory RHT could account for the full pattern of the results, suggesting that similar defaults and tradeoffs underlie the relations between hierarchical processing and perception in the visual and auditory modalities.

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“…These results were consistent with those found for speech detection and intelligibility when the information was limited to relatively narrow frequency regions (cf. Schubert and Schultz, 1962; Levitt and Rabiner, 19678;Carhart et al, 1968). For the random-frequency condition, the identification functions were quite similar to broadband speech intelligibility functions: the slopes were much shallower for NoS*r than for NoSo.…”

Section: Vl Summary and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Binaural advantage for sound pattern identification

Kidd

Mason

Rohtla

1995

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Listeners were trained to identify six patterns of eight sequentially presented 48-ms tone bursts. The variation in frequency forming the patterns was confined to a relatively narrow range around the nominal center frequency, which was either 500, 1000, or 3000 Hz, or was selected randomly on each presentation from a range of 450-3300 Hz. Detection (500 and 3000 Hz only) and identification of the six patterns masked by Gaussian noise was measured in two interaural presentation conditions: masker in-phase and signal in-phase (NoSo), and masker in-phase and signal pi rad out-of-phase (NoS pi). The differences in performance in the two interaural presentation conditions for detection and identification are referred to as "masking-level differences" (MLDs) and "identification-level differences" (IDLDs), respectively. At 500 Hz, MLDs and IDLDs were about 11-13 dB. At 3000 Hz, the MLDs and IDLDs were about 1-3 dB. For the random-center-frequency condition, the slopes of the identification-level functions were much shallower for the NoS pi condition than for the NoSo condition so the binaural advantage was large at low signal-to-noise ratios and declined as signal-to-noise ratio increased. This finding was due to the broad frequency range over which the information was distributed and the decline in the binaural advantage with increasing frequency, a conclusion consistent with that reported for the binaural advantage for speech intelligibility. A second experiment demonstrated that MLDs and IDLDs could be manipulated independently: A 500-Hz tone was added to each element of the 3000-Hz patterns. A large MLD was found--due to detection of the 500-Hz tone--while the identification-level functions were determined solely by the high-frequency information, which produced small IDLDs. Finally, the Gaussian noise masker was replaced by an informational masker comprised of eight randomly chosen eight-tone bursts played simultaneously with the signal-pattern elements which were centered at 1000 Hz. Large amounts of informational masking were found for identification. The slopes of the identification-level functions were much shallower than found for the Gaussian noise masker and a relatively small binaural advantage (about 5 dB) was observed.

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Unmasking for Pure Tones and Spondees: Interaural Phase and Time Disparities

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Speech recognition abilities in noise for children with severe-to-profound unilateral hearing impairment

Speech recognition abilities in noise for children with severe-to-profound unilateral hearing impairment

Low-Level Information and High-Level Perception: The Case of Speech in Noise

Binaural advantage for sound pattern identification

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