Relative contribution of target and masker temporal fine structure to the unmasking of consonants in noise

Abstract

The present study assessed the relative contribution of the "target" and "masker" temporal fine structure (TFS) when identifying consonants. Accordingly, the TFS of the target and that of the masker were manipulated simultaneously or independently. A 30 band vocoder was used to replace the original TFS of the stimuli with tones. Four masker types were used. They included a speech-shaped noise, a speech-shaped noise modulated by a speech envelope, a sentence, or a sentence played backward. When the TFS of the target and that of the masker were disrupted simultaneously, consonant recognition dropped significantly compared to the unprocessed condition for all masker types, except the speech-shaped noise. Disruption of only the target TFS led to a significant drop in performance with all masker types. In contrast, disruption of only the masker TFS had no effect on recognition. Overall, the present data are consistent with previous work showing that TFS information plays a significant role in speech recognition in noise, especially when the noise fluctuates over time. However, the present study indicates that listeners rely primarily on TFS information in the target and that the nature of the masker TFS has a very limited influence on the outcome of the unmasking process.