The influence of reverberation on spatial release of masking in consonant identification

This study investigates how reverberation influences spatial release of masking in consonant identification. HRTFs were measured in two rooms with different reverberation characteristics from sources directly in front of and to the right of the listener at a distance of 1 m. These two sets of room HRTFs and pseudo‐anechoic HRTFs (time‐windowing out the reverberation) were used to simulate a speech target and speech‐shaped masker over headphones in two spatial configurations. In both configurations, the target was directly ahead of the listener; the masker was either directly ahead or 45° to the right of the listener. Subjects were asked to identify the initial or final consonant (one of 12 stop and fricative consonants) in CVC nonsense syllables for different target‐to‐masker levels. Each spatial configuration and room condition was tested using binaural, monaural‐left, and monaural‐right headphone presentations. Consonant confusion matrices are analyzed to determine how specific acoustic features of cons...