These tools will no longer be maintained as of December 31, 2024. Archived website can be found here. PubMed4Hh GitHub repository can be found here. Contact NLM Customer Service if you have questions.


Pubmed for Handhelds

PUBMED FOR HANDHELDS

Search MEDLINE/PubMed

  • Title: Effectiveness of Two-Talker Maskers That Differ in Talker Congruity and Perceptual Similarity to the Target Speech.
    Author: Calandruccio L, Buss E, Bowdrie K.
    Journal: Trends Hear; 2017; 21():2331216517709385. PubMed ID: 29169315.
    Abstract:
    Previous work has shown that masked-sentence recognition is particularly poor when the masker is composed of two competing talkers, a finding that is attributed to informational masking. Informational masking tends to be largest when the target and masker talkers are perceptually similar. Reductions in masking have been observed for a wide range of target and masker differences, including language: Performance is better when the target and masker talkers speak in different languages, compared with the same language. The present study evaluated normal-hearing adults' sentence recognition in a two-talker masker as a function of the perceptual similarity between the target and each of the two masker streams. The target was English, and the maskers were composed of English, time-reversed English, or Dutch. These three masker types are known to vary in the informational masking they exert. The two talkers within the two-talker maskers were either congruent (e.g., both English) or incongruent (e.g., one English, one Dutch). As predicted, mean performance was worse for the congruent English masker than the congruent time-reversed English or congruent Dutch maskers. Incongruent two-talker maskers, with just one English masker stream, were only modestly less effective than the congruent English masker. This result indicates that two-talker masker effectiveness was determined predominantly by the one masker stream that was most perceptually similar to the target. Speech recognition in a single-talker masker differed only marginally between the English, Dutch, and time-reversed English masker types, suggesting that perceptual similarity may be more critical in a two-talker than a one-talker masker.
    [Abstract] [Full Text] [Related] [New Search]