Effect of familiar masking background on target speech recognition

摘要

Real auditory environments are usually complex. The acoustic signals reaching our ears are mixtures of target and background masking sounds. It has been demonstrated before that the human auditory system can separate target speech from a masking background more easily when the listener have been cued to the target beforehand. However, less data are avaliable concerning the influence of masker cues on the ability to recognize the target speech. A psychoacoustic experiment conducted in this study indicates that cueing the listener to the masker for a short time actually impairs, rather than improves, performance. It suggests that the prior knowledge of the masker enhances the informational masking and makes the target recognition difficult. We conclude that the human auditory system is involved in a performance of only enhancing the familiar target, but not suppressing the familiar masker speech signals.