Abstract
In reverberant rooms with multiple-people talking, spatial separation between speech sources improves recognition of attended speech, even though both the head-shadowing and interaural-interaction unmasking cues are limited by numerous reflections. It is the perceptual integration between the direct wave and its reflections that bridges the direct-reflection temporal gaps and results in the spatial unmasking under reverberant conditions. This study further investigated (1) the temporal dynamic of the direct-reflection-integration-based spatial unmasking as a function of the reflection delay, and (2) whether this temporal dynamic is correlated with the listeners’ auditory ability to temporally retain raw acoustic signals (i.e., the fast decaying primitive auditory memory, PAM). The results showed that recognition of the target speech against the speech-masker background is a descending exponential function of the delay of the simulated target reflection. In addition, the temporal extent of PAM is frequency dependent and markedly longer than that for perceptual fusion. More importantly, the temporal dynamic of the speech-recognition function is significantly correlated with the temporal extent of the PAM of low-frequency raw signals. Thus, we propose that a chain process, which links the earlier-stage PAM with the later-stage correlation computation, perceptual integration, and attention facilitation, plays a role in spatially unmasking target speech under reverberant conditions.
Highlights
Perceptual Integration and the Psychological Unmasking Effect of Spatial SeparationListeners with normal hearing are able to recognize the attended speech under noisy, multiple-people-talking conditions. ‘‘How do we recognize what one person is saying when others are speaking at the same time?’’ This cocktail-party problem, first proposed by Cherry, has puzzled people for half a century [1]
In Experiment 2, the temporal extent of primitive auditory memory (PAM) was examined by measuring the longest IAI for detecting the break in interaural correlation (BIC) embedded in either wideband or narrowband noise in the same 30 participants who participated in Experiment 1
Spatial Unmasking Based on Perceptual Integration To improve speech recognition in noisy environments with multiple people talking, listeners use various spatial and/or nonspatial perceptual/cognitive cues to facilitate perceptual segregation of the target speech and the speech masker, largely by strengthening their selective attention to the target-speech stream [2]
Summary
Perceptual Integration and the Psychological Unmasking Effect of Spatial SeparationListeners with normal hearing are able to recognize the attended speech under noisy, multiple-people-talking conditions. ‘‘How do we recognize what one person is saying when others are speaking at the same time?’’ This cocktail-party problem, first proposed by Cherry, has puzzled people for half a century [1]. ‘‘How do we recognize what one person is saying when others are speaking at the same time?’’ This cocktail-party problem, first proposed by Cherry, has puzzled people for half a century [1]. It reflects the humans’ remarkable ability to use various spatial and/or non-spatial cues to facilitate selective attention to target speech and follow the target stream against irrelevant-speech influences (for a recent review see [2]). The precedence effect plays a role in suppressing the perception of distinct echoes and facilitating the recognition and localization of sources in reverberant environments
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