Abstract

The reported studies have aimed to investigate whether informational masking in a multi-talker background relies on semantic interference between the background and target using an adapted semantic priming paradigm. In 3 experiments, participants were required to perform a lexical decision task on a target item embedded in backgrounds composed of 1–4 voices. These voices were Semantically Consistent (SC) voices (i.e., pronouncing words sharing semantic features with the target) or Semantically Inconsistent (SI) voices (i.e., pronouncing words semantically unrelated to each other and to the target). In the first experiment, backgrounds consisted of 1 or 2 SC voices. One and 2 SI voices were added in Experiments 2 and 3, respectively. The results showed a semantic priming effect only in the conditions where the number of SC voices was greater than the number of SI voices, suggesting that semantic priming depended on prime intelligibility and strategic processes. However, even if backgrounds were composed of 3 or 4 voices, reducing intelligibility, participants were able to recognize words from these backgrounds, although no semantic priming effect on the targets was observed. Overall this finding suggests that informational masking can occur at a semantic level if intelligibility is sufficient. Based on the Effortfulness Hypothesis, we also suggest that when there is an increased difficulty in extracting target signals (caused by a relatively high number of voices in the background), more cognitive resources were allocated to formal processes (i.e., acoustic and phonological), leading to a decrease in available resources for deeper semantic processing of background words, therefore preventing semantic priming from occurring.

Highlights

  • In daily life, speech is rarely perceived in silence, but with interference from wind, music or other people’s conversation

  • LEXICAL PROCESSING WITHOUT SEMANTIC ACTIVATION Our results suggest that semantic processing in cocktail party situation is not automatic

  • Given the overall results of our experiments, we argue that if the ratio of SC/total voices was

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Summary

Introduction

Speech is rarely perceived in silence, but with interference from wind, music or other people’s conversation. The cocktail party situation is described as involving two types of masking effects: energetic and informational masking (Brungart, 2001). In multi-talker background situations, the magnitude of energetic masking is proportional to the number of voices that comprise the background (Simpson and Cooke, 2005). Participants’ accuracy to detect the target token decreases as the number of voices increases up to 8 voices. Further increasing the number of voices does not lead to a decrease in accuracy. These results suggest that if energetic masking is too high, informational masking decreases with the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience www.frontiersin.org diminution of the available linguistic cues. With more than 8 talkers, phonetic cues are not or less available and cannot be attributed incorrectly to the target

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