The Listener Effect in Multitalker Speech Segregation and Talker Identification
Over six decades ago, Cherry (1953) drew attention to what he called the “cocktail-party problem”; the challenge of segregating the speech of one talker from others speaking at the same time. The problem has been actively researched ever since but for all this time one observation has eluded explana...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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SAGE Publications
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8544763/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34693853 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/23312165211051886 |
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author | Lutfi, Robert A. Rodriguez, Briana Lee, Jungmee |
author_facet | Lutfi, Robert A. Rodriguez, Briana Lee, Jungmee |
author_sort | Lutfi, Robert A. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Over six decades ago, Cherry (1953) drew attention to what he called the “cocktail-party problem”; the challenge of segregating the speech of one talker from others speaking at the same time. The problem has been actively researched ever since but for all this time one observation has eluded explanation. It is the wide variation in performance of individual listeners. That variation was replicated here for four major experimental factors known to impact performance: differences in task (talker segregation vs. identification), differences in the voice features of talkers (pitch vs. location), differences in the voice similarity and uncertainty of talkers (informational masking), and the presence or absence of linguistic cues. The effect of these factors on the segregation of naturally spoken sentences and synthesized vowels was largely eliminated in psychometric functions relating the performance of individual listeners to that of an ideal observer, d′(ideal). The effect of listeners remained as differences in the slopes of the functions (fixed effect) with little within-listener variability in the estimates of slope (random effect). The results make a case for considering the listener a factor in multitalker segregation and identification equal in status to any major experimental variable. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8544763 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | SAGE Publications |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-85447632021-10-26 The Listener Effect in Multitalker Speech Segregation and Talker Identification Lutfi, Robert A. Rodriguez, Briana Lee, Jungmee Trends Hear Original Article Over six decades ago, Cherry (1953) drew attention to what he called the “cocktail-party problem”; the challenge of segregating the speech of one talker from others speaking at the same time. The problem has been actively researched ever since but for all this time one observation has eluded explanation. It is the wide variation in performance of individual listeners. That variation was replicated here for four major experimental factors known to impact performance: differences in task (talker segregation vs. identification), differences in the voice features of talkers (pitch vs. location), differences in the voice similarity and uncertainty of talkers (informational masking), and the presence or absence of linguistic cues. The effect of these factors on the segregation of naturally spoken sentences and synthesized vowels was largely eliminated in psychometric functions relating the performance of individual listeners to that of an ideal observer, d′(ideal). The effect of listeners remained as differences in the slopes of the functions (fixed effect) with little within-listener variability in the estimates of slope (random effect). The results make a case for considering the listener a factor in multitalker segregation and identification equal in status to any major experimental variable. SAGE Publications 2021-10-23 /pmc/articles/PMC8544763/ /pubmed/34693853 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/23312165211051886 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
spellingShingle | Original Article Lutfi, Robert A. Rodriguez, Briana Lee, Jungmee The Listener Effect in Multitalker Speech Segregation and Talker Identification |
title | The Listener Effect in Multitalker Speech Segregation and Talker Identification |
title_full | The Listener Effect in Multitalker Speech Segregation and Talker Identification |
title_fullStr | The Listener Effect in Multitalker Speech Segregation and Talker Identification |
title_full_unstemmed | The Listener Effect in Multitalker Speech Segregation and Talker Identification |
title_short | The Listener Effect in Multitalker Speech Segregation and Talker Identification |
title_sort | listener effect in multitalker speech segregation and talker identification |
topic | Original Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8544763/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34693853 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/23312165211051886 |
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