Bidelman Gavin M, Bernard Fallon, Skubic Kimberly
Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America.
Program in Neuroscience, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2025 Jan 30;20(1):e0318600. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0318600. eCollection 2025.
We aimed to test whether hearing speech in phonetic categories (as opposed to a continuous/gradient fashion) affords benefits to "cocktail party" speech perception. We measured speech perception performance (recognition, localization, and source monitoring) in a simulated 3D cocktail party environment. We manipulated task difficulty by varying the number of additional maskers presented at other spatial locations in the horizontal soundfield (1-4 talkers) and via forward vs. time-reversed maskers, the latter promoting a release from masking. In separate tasks, we measured isolated phoneme categorization using two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) and visual analog scaling (VAS) tasks designed to promote more/less categorical hearing and thus test putative links between categorization and real-world speech-in-noise skills. We first show cocktail party speech recognition accuracy and speed decline with additional competing talkers and amidst forward compared to reverse maskers. Dividing listeners into "discrete" vs. "continuous" categorizers based on their VAS labeling (i.e., whether responses were binary or continuous judgments), we then show the degree of release from masking experienced at the cocktail party is predicted by their degree of categoricity in phoneme labeling and not high-frequency audiometric thresholds; more discrete listeners make less effective use of time-reversal and show less release from masking than their gradient responding peers. Our results suggest a link between speech categorization skills and cocktail party processing, with a gradient (rather than discrete) listening strategy benefiting degraded speech perception. These findings suggest that less flexibility in binning sounds into categories may be one factor that contributes to figure-ground deficits.
我们旨在测试以语音类别（而非连续/渐变方式）聆听语音是否有助于“鸡尾酒会”场景中的语音感知。我们在模拟的三维鸡尾酒会环境中测量了语音感知表现（识别、定位和声源监测）。我们通过改变水平声场中其他空间位置呈现的额外掩蔽音数量（1至4个说话者）以及使用正向与反向掩蔽音来操纵任务难度，后者可促进掩蔽解除。在单独的任务中，我们使用旨在促进更多/更少类别听觉的二选一强制选择（2AFC）和视觉模拟评分（VAS）任务测量了孤立音素分类，从而测试分类与现实世界噪声中语音技能之间的假定联系。我们首先表明，随着额外竞争说话者的增加以及与反向掩蔽音相比正向掩蔽音的存在，鸡尾酒会语音识别的准确性和速度会下降。根据听众的VAS标记将其分为“离散”与“连续”分类者（即反应是二元还是连续判断），然后我们表明，鸡尾酒会中经历的掩蔽解除程度由他们在音素标记中的类别程度预测，而非高频听力阈值；与梯度反应的同龄人相比，更离散的听众对时间反转的利用效率更低，掩蔽解除程度也更低。我们的结果表明语音分类技能与鸡尾酒会处理之间存在联系，梯度（而非离散）的聆听策略有利于退化语音感知。这些发现表明，将声音分类时灵活性较低可能是导致前景-背景感知缺陷的一个因素。
