Normal-hearing listeners exploit temporal dips in fluctuating maskers to detect signals.
Evidence
To understand Hall et al.’s results, we must first consider how a fluctuating masker may provide benefits to a listener. A fluctuating masker has “dips” or “valleys” in the waveform. These dips provide brief epochs in time that have high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), compared with the waveform peaks, and a listener with normal hearing can take advantage of these dips to detect a signal (Buus, 1985). Steady maskers do not have pronounced dips and therefore do not provide opportunities for dip listening. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 551
Categorization
- DEFINE: Introduces the concept of ‘dip listening’ and the dips/valleys vocabulary that structures the whole masking-release literature.
- SHARE: Good for an audiologist or hearing-research colleague specifically working on speech-in-noise and temporal processing deficits.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 551
- XREF: connects to: Reducing audible fluctuations in a masker lowers post-masked thresholds by up to 24 dB — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 570; Hearing-impaired listeners fail to gain temporal resolution in background noise — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 1933; A masker raises the audibility threshold of a test sound. (+5 more)