Symmetric masker paradigms were designed to remove head-shadow benefits from spatial release from masking

Evidence

A popular stimulus paradigm that has been used in recent years consists of a frontally located speech target, and competing speech maskers presented symmetrically from the sides. This configuration was originally implemented to minimize the contribution of long-term head-shadow benefits to SRM (Noble et al. 1997 ; Marrone et al. 2008 ) but has since been adopted as a striking case in which the difference between NH and HI listeners is large. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1725

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what the symmetric-masker configuration is and the methodological reason it exists.