Multitalker speech perception with ideal time-frequency segregation: Effects of voice characteristics and number of talkers

When a target voice is masked by an increasingly similar masker voice, increases in energetic masking are likely to occur due to increased spectro-temporal overlap in the competing speech waveforms. However, the impact of this increase may be obscured by informational masking effects related to the increased confusability of the target and masking utterances. In this study, the effects of target-masker similarity and the number of competing talkers on the energetic component of speech-on-speech masking were measured with an ideal time-frequency segregation (ITFS) technique that retained all the target-dominated time-frequency regions of a multitalker mixture but eliminated all the time-frequency regions dominated by the maskers. The results show that target-masker similarity has a small but systematic impact on energetic masking, with roughly a 1 dB release from masking for same-sex maskers versus same-talker maskers and roughly an additional 1 dB release from masking for different-sex masking voices. The results of a second experiment measuring ITFS performance with up to 18 interfering talkers indicate that energetic masking increased systematically with the number of competing talkers. These results suggest that energetic masking differences related to target-masker similarity have a much smaller impact on multitalker listening performance than energetic masking effects related to the number of competing talkers in the stimulus and non-energetic masking effects related to the confusability of the target and masking voices.