Abstract
To hear out a conversation against other talkers listeners overcome energetic and informational masking. Largely attributed to top-down processes, information masking has also been demonstrated using unintelligible speech and amplitude-modulated maskers suggesting bottom-up processes. We examined the role of speech-like amplitude modulations in information masking using a spatial masking release paradigm. Separating a target talker from two masker talkers produced a 20 dB improvement in speech reception threshold; 40% of which was attributed to a release from informational masking. When across frequency temporal modulations in the masker talkers are decorrelated the speech is unintelligible, although the within frequency modulation characteristics remains identical. Used as a masker as above, the information masking accounted for 37% of the spatial unmasking seen with this masker. This unintelligible and highly differentiable masker is unlikely to involve top-down processes. These data provides strong evidence of bottom-up masking involving speech-like, within-frequency modulations and that this, presumably low level process, can be modulated by selective spatial attention.
Highlights
To hear out a conversation against other talkers listeners overcome energetic and informational masking
Before considering the potential basis of that non-energetic masking and its release, it is useful to consider the spatial unmasking demonstrated by the speech masker and the speech matched noise – both of which have been used previously in studies of energetic and informational masking
Subtle difference between the listening groups: The listeners in this study were acclimatised to Australian English and the Coordinate Response Measure (CRM) corpus is recorded with North American accents
Summary
To hear out a conversation against other talkers listeners overcome energetic and informational masking. Familiarity with the target talker[7,8], knowing where[9] or when[10] to listen and virtually any perceived physical difference such as spatial location[11,12] or voice quality[3] all play important roles in reducing informational masking All of these findings indicate a role for attention in the processes of successfully parsing the different streams of concurrent speech and sustaining selection of the appropriate stream for the task at hand (see for e.g. Ref. 13). One form of informational masking could rely on exogenous attention, elicited by a salient stimulus, drawing attention to an object or stream that is not appropriate to the task This could be the basis of the so-called ‘‘odd-sex’’ distractor phenomenon[3] where including say a female talker masker with a male target and another male masker talker produces more informational masking that would have occurred had all the talkers been of the same gender. Gallun et al[19] report that the effectiveness of an across ear masker was dependent on the temporal-spectral similarity to the target
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