Work

Masking Release Due to Linguistic and Phonetic Dissimilarity Between the Target and Masker Speech

Year: 2013

Type: article

Abstract: PURPOSE: To investigate masking release for speech maskers for linguistically and phonetically close (English and Dutch) and distant (English and Mandarin) language pairs. METHOD: Thirty-two monolingual speakers of English with normal audiometric thresholds participated in the study. Data are reported for an English sentence recognition task in English and for Dutch and Mandarin competing speech maskers (Experiment 1) and noise maskers (Experiment 2) that were matched either to the long-term average speech spectra or to the temporal modulations of the speech maskers from Experiment 1. RESULTS: Listener performance increased as the target-to-masker linguistic distance increased (English-in-English < English-in-Dutch < English-in-Mandarin). CONCLUSION: Spectral differences between maskers can account for some, but not all, of the variation in performance between maskers; however, temporal differences did not seem to play a significant role.

Source: American Journal of Audiology

DOI: 10.1044/1059-0889(2013/12-0072)

Authors: Lauren Calandruccio, Susanne Brouwer, Kristin J. Van Engen, Sumitrajit Dhar, Ann R. Bradlow

Institutions: Queens College, CUNY, Northwestern University

Language: English

Topic: Hearing Loss and Rehabilitation

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders

Award: Talker-Listener Alignment during Speech Production and Perception