A note on simultaneous and interleaved masking.
Speech and noise were switched periodically from ear to ear at a rate high enough to create a binaurally fused image. Two masking conditions were investigated. In one the speech and noise were switched in unison from ear to ear such that both speech and noise were presented simultaneoully to the same ear. In the other case, the speech and noise were interleaved such that there was no simultaneous overlap of the speech and noise at any one ear. The difference in masking levels between these two conditions was found to be on the order of 20 dB. The technique offers some interesting possibilities for investigating the relative effects of central and peripheral masking in both normal and hearing-impaired listeners.
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception; D006801:Humans; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D013060:Speech