Auditory Behavioral Research Laboratory, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida 33620, USA.
Spatial Hearing Laboratory, Department of Speech and Hearing, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85281, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2022 Sep;152(3):1804. doi: 10.1121/10.0014116.
A molecular (trial-by-trial) analysis of data from a cocktail-party, target-talker search task was used to test two general classes of explanations accounting for individual differences in listener performance: cue weighting models for which errors are tied to the speech features talkers have in common with the target and internal noise models for which errors are largely independent of these features. The speech of eight different talkers was played simultaneously over eight different loudspeakers surrounding the listener. The locations of the eight talkers varied at random from trial to trial. The listener's task was to identify the location of a target talker with which they had previously been familiarized. An analysis of the response counts to individual talkers showed predominant confusion with one talker sharing the same fundamental frequency and timbre as the target and, secondarily, other talkers sharing the same timbre. The confusions occurred for a roughly constant 31% of all of the trials for all of the listeners. The remaining errors were uniformly distributed across the remaining talkers and responsible for the large individual differences in performances observed. The results are consistent with a model in which largely stimulus-independent factors (internal noise) are responsible for the wide variation in performance across listeners.
采用鸡尾酒会目标说话人搜索任务的逐次分析数据的方法，我们测试了两种解释个体听众表现差异的通用类别的模型：一种是基于说话人共有特征（如基频和音色）的线索加权模型，另一种是基于与这些特征关系不大的内部噪声模型。八个不同的说话人在环绕听众的八个不同扬声器上同时播放。说话人的位置从一次试验到另一次试验随机变化。听众的任务是识别与他们之前熟悉的目标说话人所在的位置。对个体说话人响应计数的分析表明，与目标说话人具有相同基频和音色的一个说话人引起了主要的混淆，其次是具有相同音色的其他说话人。对于所有听众的大约 31%的所有试验，这种混淆都经常发生。其余的错误均匀分布在其余的说话人之间，这是造成观察到的表现差异的主要原因。这些结果与一个模型一致，该模型认为主要是刺激独立的因素（内部噪声）导致了听众之间表现的广泛变化。
