Central auditory processing in the cocktail-party effect
Abstract
When we try to understand one talker in a group of talkers the capacities of our auditory system are stretched to the limit. Using the superposition of incoming sounds as input, it has to identify the target speech, trace it over time, ll in parts masked by other sounds, and nally convert it to a stream of meaningful information. Research into this “cocktail party” effect has proceeded along different lines that for a long time showed little or no overlap. Well-known for most psycho-acousticians are studies of peripheral effects such as (energetic) masking and binaural unmasking. In this presentation an overview is given of three other research lines that have addressed central processing of complex speech stimuli, and relationships between these lines are discussed. The oldest line looked at the role of attention in the selection of the target speech from all signals entering the ears. A more recent line has focused on the process of separating and piecing together acoustic information across time and space, which is referred to as grouping. In the third line, masking is studied but effects of peripheral (un)masking are factored out so that only the excess masking – referred to as informational masking, remains.
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