Modelling the combined effect of binaural hearing and reverberation

To study the interaction between the intelligibility advantage in rooms due to the presence of early reflections and due to the binaural blocking of interferers from undesired directions, a series of speech reception threshold (SRT) experiments was performed in a simulated room and with a single early reflection of the frontal target speech source as a function of its delay ranging from 0 to 200 ms. From the data and the model considerations given here, one can conclude that binaural unmasking and temporal integration of reflections seem to be comparatively independent from each other, thus providing evidence for a model with a binaural processing stage as a frontend and a reverberation compensation stage (like the MTF model) as the subsequent, independent stage. However, a blocking effect was found for reflections ipsilateral to the noise direction and a release from the deterioration effect at 200 ms delay was found for all non-blocked reflections from azimuths deviating from the midline. These findings are at odds with three versions of a model of binaural speech intelligibility in rooms described here.