Consonant contrasts in a multiple, simultaneous word identification task

Abstract

People often have difficulty communicating in the presence of concurrent conversations. This well-known ‘‘cocktail party effect’’ can be described as a combination of energetic and informational masking. The purpose of this study was to measure and model the effects of energetic and informational masking that occur when two people speak at the same time. The word identification test used in the experiments was the Modified Rhyme Test (MRT), which afforded a multitude of initial and final consonant pairs when phrases were played simultaneously. The MRT was used as both the stimulus and the masker, which were presented monaurally at 75 dB SPL over Sennheiser HD-520 headphones to four normal hearing listeners. The independent variables included 30 pairs of MRT word lists, and twelve pairs of same-sex talkers. The dependent variable was speech (consonant) intelligibility as measured with the MRT. Results will be discussed in the context of place of articulation, manner of articulation, signal-to-noise-ratio of the phoneme pairs, and informational masking model predictions.