Effect of target-masker similarity on across-ear interference in a dichotic cocktail-party listening task.
Similarity between the target and masking voices is known to have a strong influence on performance in monaural and binaural selective attention tasks, but little is known about the role it might play in dichotic listening tasks with a target signal and one masking voice in the one ear and a second independent masking voice in the opposite ear. This experiment examined performance in a dichotic listening task with a target talker in one ear and same-talker, same-sex, or different-sex maskers in both the target and the unattended ears. The results indicate that listeners were most susceptible to across-ear interference with a different-sex within-ear masker and least susceptible with a same-talker within-ear masker, suggesting that the amount of across-ear interference cannot be predicted from the difficulty of selectively attending to the within-ear masking voice. The results also show that the amount of across-ear interference consistently increases when the across-ear masking voice is more similar to the target speech than the within-ear masking voice is, but that no corresponding decline in across-ear interference occurs when the across-ear voice is less similar to the target than the within-ear voice. These results are consistent with an "integrated strategy" model of speech perception where the listener chooses a segregation strategy based on the characteristics of the masker present in the target ear and the amount of across-ear interference is determined by the extent to which this strategy can also effectively be used to suppress the masker in the unattended ear.
Brungart
Douglas S
DS
Air Force Research Laboratory, WPAFB, Ohio 45433, USA. douglas.brungart@wpafb.af.mil
Simpson
Brian D
BD
D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D004007:Dichotic Listening Tests; D004423:Ear / Q000502:physiology*; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006309:Hearing / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008144:Loudness Perception; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics