The effect of spatial separation on informational masking of speech in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners.

The ability to understand speech in a multi-source environment containing informational masking may depend on the perceptual arrangement of signal and masker objects in space. In normal-hearing listeners, Arbogast et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 112, 2086-2098 (2002)] found an 18-dB spatial release from a primarily informational masker, compared to 7 dB for a primarily energetic masker. This article extends the earlier work to include the study of listeners with sensorineural hearing loss. Listeners performed closed-set speech recognition in two spatial conditions: 0 degrees and 90 degrees separation between signal and masker. Three maskers were tested: (1) the different-band sentence masker was designed to be primarily informational; (2) the different-band noise masker was a control for the different-band sentence; and (3) the same-band noise masker was designed to be primarily energetic. The spatial release from the different-band sentence was larger than for the other maskers, but was smaller (10 dB) for the hearing-impaired group than for the normal-hearing group (15 dB). The smaller benefit for the hearing-impaired listeners can be partially explained by masker sensation level. However, the results suggest that hearing-impaired listeners can use the perceptual effect of spatial separation to improve speech recognition in the presence of a primarily informational masker.

[1]  E. C. Cherry.  Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech, with One and with Two Ears , 1953 .

[2]  T W Tillman,et al.  Perceptual masking in multiple sound backgrounds. , 1969, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[3]  H. Levitt.  Transformed up-down methods in psychoacoustics. , 1971, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[4]  A. Duquesnoy.  Effect of a single interfering noise or speech source upon the binaural sentence intelligibility of aged persons. , 1983, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[5]  Eberhard Zwicker,et al.  Binaural masking-level differences with tones masked by noises of various bandwidths and levels , 1984, Hearing Research.

[6]  B C Moore,et al.  Auditory filter shapes in subjects with unilateral and bilateral cochlear impairments. , 1986, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[7]  D. M. Green,et al.  Masking produced by spectral uncertainty with multicomponent maskers , 1987, Perception & psychophysics.

[8]  R Plomp,et al.  The effect of head-induced interaural time and level differences on speech intelligibility in noise. , 1987, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[9]  R. Plomp,et al.  Binaural speech intelligibility in noise for hearing-impaired listeners. , 1989, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[10]  R Plomp,et al.  A clinical test for the assessment of binaural speech perception in noise. , 1990, Audiology : official organ of the International Society of Audiology.

[11]  R Plomp,et al.  Effect of multiple speechlike maskers on binaural speech recognition in normal and impaired hearing. , 1992, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[12]  M R Leek,et al.  Auditory filter shapes of normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners in continuous broadband noise. , 1993, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[13]  R V Shannon,et al.  Speech Recognition with Primarily Temporal Cues , 1995, Science.

[14]  J H Grose,et al.  Perceptual organization of sequential stimuli in listeners with cochlear hearing loss. , 1996, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[15]  W. Noble,et al.  Auditory localization, detection of spatial separateness, and speech hearing in noise by hearing impaired listeners. , 1997, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[16]  B Kollmeier,et al.  Directivity of binaural noise reduction in spatial multiple noise-source arrangements for normal and impaired listeners. , 1997, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[17]  R A Lutfi,et al.  Nonmonotonicity of informational masking. , 1998, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[18]  C. Mason,et al.  Release from masking due to spatial separation of sources in the identification of nonspeech auditory patterns. , 1998, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[19]  R L Freyman,et al.  The role of perceived spatial separation in the unmasking of speech. , 1999, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[20]  W. T. Nelson,et al.  A speech corpus for multitalker communications research. , 2000, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[21]  Christine R. Mason,et al.  Informational Masking in Listeners with Sensorineural Hearing Loss , 2002, Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology.

[22]  R L Freyman,et al.  Spatial release from informational masking in speech recognition. , 2001, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[23]  D S Brungart,et al.  Informational and energetic masking effects in the perception of two simultaneous talkers. , 2001, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[24]  G. Kidd,et al.  The effect of spatial separation on informational and energetic masking of speech. , 2002, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[25]  G. Kidd,et al.  Similarity, uncertainty, and masking in the identification of nonspeech auditory patterns. , 2002, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[26]  B. Shinn-Cunningham,et al.  Note on informational masking (L) , 2003 .

[27]  B. Shinn-Cunningham,et al.  Informational masking: counteracting the effects of stimulus uncertainty by decreasing target-masker similarity. , 2003, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[28]  Ruth Y Litovsky,et al.  The benefit of binaural hearing in a cocktail party: effect of location and type of interferer. , 2004, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[29]  Douglas S Brungart,et al.  Across-ear interference from parametrically degraded synthetic speech signals in a dichotic cocktail-party listening task. , 2005, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.