Spatial release of masking survives when only loud, monaurally detectable speech remains.
Evidence
The stable spatial release from masking over the range of SNR criteria tested is one of the most important outcomes of this study. It suggests that recovery of sub-threshold speech information by binaural cues does not play a role in the spatial release from masking in a multispeaker situation. Instead, masking release appeared to be sustained even when only high-SNR components of target speech were left in the signal. These supra-threshold components should be detectable monaurally in both the collocated and spatially separated conditions and thus their detection should not rely on a binaural unmasking mechanism as is the case for BMLDs. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1670
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
Related
- Spatial release from masking persists even when target speech components are selectively discarded (similarity 0.90)
- Binaural unmasking cannot explain spatial release from masking in multispeaker situations (similarity 0.89)
- Directional source allocation, not binaural unmasking, explains spatial release (similarity 0.89)
- Binaural masking release is modeled as within-band noise floor reduction (similarity 0.86)
- Spatially separated speech sources improve intelligibility through binaural release from masking. (similarity 0.86)
- Spatial release from masking stays constant across all SNR criteria tested (similarity 0.86)
- Spatially separated sources reveal speech components audible only via binaural processing (similarity 0.86)
- Binaural release of masking acts on spectro-temporal units, not frequency channels (similarity 0.85)
- Spatial separation of talkers reduces ambiguity in assigning speech components. (similarity 0.85)
- Binaural unmasking depends on masker duration but not signal duration (similarity 0.83)
- Spatial release from masking is measured by adapting target-to-masker ratio to threshold (similarity 0.83)
- Spatial release from masking was tested using same-talker distractors with HRTF spatialization (similarity 0.83)
- Interaural noise correlation inversely drives the magnitude of binaural release from masking. (similarity 0.81)
- Raising presentation level reduces the masking-release advantage from spectrally sparse or unmodulated maskers (similarity 0.81)
- Masking release from modulated noise also improves speech perception. (similarity 0.81)