PERCEIVED SPATIAL SEPARATION INDUCED BY THE PRECEDENCE EFFECT RELEASES SPEECH FROM INFORMATIONAL MASKING

摘要

Spatial separation of the source of signal sound from the source of interference sound improves the recognition of the signal (Zurek et al., 1993). In reverberant environments, listeners usually "fuse" the direct sound wave from a source with its reflections and perceive a single event as originating from the direction of the source. This phenomenon is called the precedence effect (Litovsky, 1999). Using the perceptual consequence of the precedence effect (Freyman el al., 1999) induced a perceived separation of images of target and masking stimuli, and found a much larger advantage of the perceived spatial separation in English speech recognition when masking stimuli were informational than energetic.