Is there an auditory identification “pop-out” for moving speech targets?

Abstract

Stationary visual targets are often far more salient when the target moves against an otherwise static background—the so-called “pop out” effect. In the first of two experiments, we tested for a similar effect in the auditory domain. Listeners were asked to identify a single word, spoken by a female, in the midst of two or four masking words spoken by males. Listener performance was estimated in terms of percentage of correct responses and compared between conditions where target and maskers were co-located or located at different locations. For some conditions, the target word was amplitude-panned across the loudspeaker array and in others the target remained stationary. Results showed a spatial release from masking for all conditions where the target and maskers were at different locations. The presentation of a stationary versus moving target stimulus yielded no statistically significant difference in identification performance, suggesting that the visual “pop-out” effect may not have a direct corollar...