Better-ear glimpsing efficiency with symmetrically-placed interfering talkers

In listening tasks where a target speech signal is spatially separated from a masking voice, listeners can often gain a substantial advantage in performance by attending to the ear with the better signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). However, this better-ear strategy becomes much more complicated when a tar...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Vol. 132; no. 4; p. 2545
Main Authors Brungart, Douglas S, Iyer, Nandini
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 01.10.2012
Subjects
Acoustic Stimulation
Adolescent
Adult
Analysis of Variance
Audiometry, Speech
Auditory Threshold
Cues
Ear - physiology
Female
Functional Laterality
Humans
Male
Noise - adverse effects
Perceptual Masking
Signal Detection, Psychological
Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
Sound Localization
Sound Spectrography
Speech Intelligibility
Speech Perception
Young Adult
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Summary:In listening tasks where a target speech signal is spatially separated from a masking voice, listeners can often gain a substantial advantage in performance by attending to the ear with the better signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). However, this better-ear strategy becomes much more complicated when a target talker located in front of the listener is masked by interfering talkers positioned at symmetric locations to the left and right of the target. When this happens, there are no long-term SNR advantages at either ear and the only binaural SNR advantages available are the result of complicated better-ear glimpses that vary as a function of frequency and rapidly switch back and forth between the two ears according to the natural fluctuations in the relative levels of the two masking voices. In this study, a signal processing technique was used to take the better-ear glimpses that would ordinarily be randomly distributed across the two ears in a binaural speech signal and move them all into the same ear. This resulted in a monaural signal that contained all the information available to an ideal listener using an optimal binaural glimpsing strategy. Speech intelligibility was measured with these optimized monaural stimuli and compared to performance with unprocessed binaural speech stimuli. Performance was similar in these two conditions, suggesting that listeners with normal hearing are able to efficiently extract information from better-ear glimpses that fluctuate rapidly across frequency and across the two ears.
ISSN:1520-8524
DOI:10.1121/1.4747005