Sentence recognition as a function of the number of talkers in competing multi-talker babble

Abstract

Multiple-talker babble is used in studies of speech perception and processing both as a tool for loading perceptual and cognitive tasks and for direct assessment of speech perception in noise. Single interfering talkers and babbles containing few talkers differ dramatically, however, from babbles with high numbers of talkers. While low N-talker babbles provide greater opportunities for glimpsing speech targets during spectral and temporal dips in the maskers (i.e., less energetic masking), the linguistic information available to listeners in the maskers themselves also imposes higher-level interference (i.e., informational masking) that may detract from the identification of target speech. In order to assess the relative overall masking effects of N-talker babble for sentence recognition, the current study utilizes a range of maskers varying in N (1-8), as well as speech-shaped noise. Data collected to date show that performance declines as talkers are added to the masker (that is, as energetic masking increases), but that performance in 6-8 talker babble is significantly better than in speech-shaped noise. Individual variability on speech perception in these various maskers is being assessed by comparing performance on the speech-in-noise task to performance on a range of cognitive and psychoacoustic tasks.