TY - JOUR
T1 - The effects of target-masker sex mismatch on linguistic release from masking
AU - Williams, Brittany T.
AU - Viswanathan, Navin
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) funded predoctoral training fellowship to B.T.W. (Grant No. T32 DC000052). We thank Maya Mills and Lauren Spalding for their assistance with testing the participants. We also thank Dr. Jacqueline Mogle for her guidance on post hoc data analysis. We are grateful to Dr. Susanne Brouwer for providing the translated SNST sentence lists and Dr. Lauren Calandruccio for providing sentence lists used in the past experiments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Acoustical Society of America.
PY - 2020/10/1
Y1 - 2020/10/1
N2 - Listeners often experience challenges understanding an interlocutor (target) in the presence of competing talkers (maskers). However, during linguistic release from masking (LRM), this difficulty decreases for native language targets (English) when paired with different language maskers (e.g., Dutch). There is considerable evidence that the linguistic similarity between target-masker pairs determines the size of LRM. This study investigated whether and how LRM is affected when the streams also differed in talker sex. Experiment 1 investigated intelligibility for English targets in sex-matched and mismatched conditions with Dutch or English maskers. While typical LRM effects were obtained when sex was matched, opposite effects were detected when sex was mismatched. In experiment 2, Mandarin maskers were used to increase linguistic dissimilarity and elicit stronger LRM effects. Despite the greater linguistic dissimilarity, the surprising reverse LRM effect in the sex-mismatch condition persisted. In experiment 3, the target stream was held constant and talker sex and language were manipulated in the masker. Here, expected LRM effects were obtained for both the sex-matched and sex-mismatched conditions. This indicated that the locus of the dissimilarities and not just relative properties affect LRM. Broadly, this study suggests that using naturally varying listening situations advances understanding of factors underlying LRM.
AB - Listeners often experience challenges understanding an interlocutor (target) in the presence of competing talkers (maskers). However, during linguistic release from masking (LRM), this difficulty decreases for native language targets (English) when paired with different language maskers (e.g., Dutch). There is considerable evidence that the linguistic similarity between target-masker pairs determines the size of LRM. This study investigated whether and how LRM is affected when the streams also differed in talker sex. Experiment 1 investigated intelligibility for English targets in sex-matched and mismatched conditions with Dutch or English maskers. While typical LRM effects were obtained when sex was matched, opposite effects were detected when sex was mismatched. In experiment 2, Mandarin maskers were used to increase linguistic dissimilarity and elicit stronger LRM effects. Despite the greater linguistic dissimilarity, the surprising reverse LRM effect in the sex-mismatch condition persisted. In experiment 3, the target stream was held constant and talker sex and language were manipulated in the masker. Here, expected LRM effects were obtained for both the sex-matched and sex-mismatched conditions. This indicated that the locus of the dissimilarities and not just relative properties affect LRM. Broadly, this study suggests that using naturally varying listening situations advances understanding of factors underlying LRM.
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U2 - 10.1121/10.0002165
DO - 10.1121/10.0002165
M3 - Article
C2 - 33138488
AN - SCOPUS:85094607950
VL - 148
SP - 2006
EP - 2014
JO - Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
JF - Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
SN - 0001-4966
IS - 4
ER -