Spatial release from masking in anechoic and reverberant environments

Abstract

Listening with both ears provides children with access to binaural and monaural cues that are helpful for understanding speech in competing babbles. Specifically, when the target and masker are spatially separated, children can gain an intelligibility benefit which is known as spatial release from masking (SRM). Recent work [Peng et al., 2021 JASA] suggested that school-age children demonstrated immature SRM using binaural cues that are distorted by reverberation. In this follow-up study, we further investigate the effect of reverberant distortion on individual auditory spatial cues, namely binaural and monaural head shadow cues. We compare SRM between adults and school-age children with typical hearing using the novel measure of minimum angle of separation (MAS) between target and masker, for which individual achieves a 20% intelligibility gain, in both virtually simulated anechoic and reverberant environments. MAS was measured in both binaural and monaural hearing conditions, as well asymmetric versus asymmetric masker displacement to probe access to various auditory cues of interest. Preliminary results show that adults demonstrate similar SRM in anechoic and in reverberation of T60 = ∼0.6 s, but better (smaller MAS) when additional spatial cues become available. Reverberation effect on children’s SRM will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH-NIDCD.]