The interaction of location with acoustic scale in concurrent speech recognition.

Abstract

Location and acoustic scale cues have been shown to have a significant effect on the recognition of speech in multispeaker environments. The interaction of these two cues is less well understood. In this study, subjects are presented with two triplets of concurrent speech syllables with similar temporal envelopes, and asked to recognize a specific target syllable. The task was made more or less difficult by changing the location of the distracting speaker, the scale difference between the two speakers and the relative level of the two speakers. Scale differences were produced by changing the vocal tract length and glottal pulse rate of resynthesized speech: 32 scale differences were used. Location cues were produced by convolving heat‐related transfer functions with the stimulus. The target speaker was located directly to the front of the listener and the distracting/masking speaker located from one of five locations (0, 4, 8, 16, 32 deg) on the 0 deg horizontal plane. Target‐to‐masker ratios of 0 and −6 ...