The precedence effect for speech and hearing impairment
Abstract
The “precedence effect” - the dominance of the onset when localizing sounds - is a fundamental part of spatial hearing. It enables a listener to make a decision on the direction of a source using only the rst-arriving (direct) sound while ignoring subsequent echoes and reverberation. Any dif culties with the precedence effect may thus be of practical importance as they will interfere with the perception of sounds in rooms. This may be especially true in complex, dynamically-changing backgrounds in which the direct sound and echo may be occasionally hidden. Here we report two experiments on the effectiveness of the precedence effect, measuring (1) localization dominance for speech targets (single words) in quiet and partially masked by diffuse speech babble, and (2) the effective onset duration needed to localize a sound. The results showed that, in general, the precedence effect worked less well for the more impaired listeners, but there was a fair amount of inter-individual differences.
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