Hawley M L, Litovsky R Y, Colburn H S
Hearing Research Center, Boston University, Massachusetts 02215, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 1999 Jun;105(6):3436-48. doi: 10.1121/1.424670.
Natural environments typically contain sound sources other than the source of interest that may interfere with the ability of listeners to extract information about the primary source. Studies of speech intelligibility and localization by normal-hearing listeners in the presence of competing speech are reported on in this work. One, two or three competing sentences [IEEE Trans. Audio Electroacoust. 17(3), 225-246 (1969)] were presented from various locations in the horizontal plane in several spatial configurations relative to a target sentence. Target and competing sentences were spoken by the same male talker and at the same level. All experiments were conducted both in an actual sound field and in a virtual sound field. In the virtual sound field, both binaural and monaural conditions were tested. In the speech intelligibility experiment, there were significant improvements in performance when the target and competing sentences were spatially separated. Performance was similar in the actual sound-field and virtual sound-field binaural listening conditions for speech intelligibility. Although most of these improvements are evident monaurally when using the better ear, binaural listening was necessary for large improvements in some situations. In the localization experiment, target source identification was measured in a seven-alternative absolute identification paradigm with the same competing sentence configurations as for the speech study. Performance in the localization experiment was significantly better in the actual sound-field than in the virtual sound-field binaural listening conditions. Under binaural conditions, localization performance was very good, even in the presence of three competing sentences. Under monaural conditions, performance was much worse. For the localization experiment, there was no significant effect of the number or configuration of the competing sentences tested. For these experiments, the performance in the speech intelligibility experiment was not limited by localization ability.
自然环境中通常存在除感兴趣声源之外的其他声源，这些声源可能会干扰听众提取有关主要声源信息的能力。本文报道了正常听力的听众在存在竞争性言语情况下的言语可懂度和定位研究。相对于目标句子，以几种空间配置从水平面的不同位置呈现一、二或三个竞争性句子[《IEEE 音频与电声学汇刊》17(3)，225 - 246(1969)]。目标句子和竞争性句子由同一位男性说话者以相同音量说出。所有实验均在实际声场和虚拟声场中进行。在虚拟声场中，测试了双耳和单耳条件。在言语可懂度实验中，当目标句子和竞争性句子在空间上分离时，表现有显著改善。在实际声场和虚拟声场双耳聆听条件下，言语可懂度的表现相似。尽管在使用较好耳朵时，这些改善大多在单耳聆听时就很明显，但在某些情况下，双耳聆听对于大幅改善是必要的。在定位实验中，在与言语研究相同的竞争性句子配置下，以七选绝对识别范式测量目标声源识别。定位实验在实际声场中的表现明显优于虚拟声场双耳聆听条件下的表现。在双耳条件下，即使存在三个竞争性句子，定位表现也非常好。在单耳条件下，表现则差得多。对于定位实验，所测试的竞争性句子的数量或配置没有显著影响。对于这些实验，言语可懂度实验中的表现不受定位能力的限制。
