title: Pure linguistic interference during comprehension of competing speech signals.
abstract: Speech-in-speech perception can be challenging because the processing of competing acoustic and linguistic information leads to informational masking. Here, a method is proposed to isolate the linguistic component of informational masking while keeping the distractor's acoustic information unchanged. Participants performed a dichotic listening cocktail-party task before and after training on 4-band noise-vocoded sentences that became intelligible through the training. Distracting noise-vocoded speech interfered more with target speech comprehension after training (i.e., when intelligible) than before training (i.e., when unintelligible) at -3 dB SNR. These findings confirm that linguistic and acoustic information have distinct masking effects during speech-in-speech comprehension.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Bohan
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Dai
authors.affiliation: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands bohan.dai@mpi.nl, j.mcqueen@donders.ru.nl, peter.hagoort@mpi.nl, a.kosem@donders.ru.nl.
authors.forename: James M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: McQueen
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Hagoort
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kösem
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D032882:Comprehension; D004007:Dichotic Listening Tests; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects*; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D059629:Signal-To-Noise Ratio; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception; D014833:Voice Quality; D055815:Young Adult