title: Consonant identification in N-talker babble is a nonmonotonic function of N.
abstract: Consonant identification rates were measured for vowel-consonant-vowel tokens gated with N-talker babble noise and babble-modulated noise for an extensive range of N, at a fixed signal-to-noise ratio. In the natural babble condition, intelligibility was a nonmonotonic function of N, with a broad performance minimum from N = 6 to N = 128. Identification rates in babble-modulated noise fell gradually with N. The contributions of factors such as energetic masking, linguistic confusion, attentional load, peripheral adaptation, and stationarity to the perception of consonants in N-talker babble are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street, Sheffield S1 4DP, England. s.simpson@dcs.shef.ac.uk
authors.forename: Sarah A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Simpson
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cooke
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D006801:Humans; D009622:Noise; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D013060:Speech; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*