Peng Z Ellen, Sweeney Victoria
Functional Hearing Laboratory, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, Nebraska 68131,
JASA Express Lett. 2025 Feb 1;5(2). doi: 10.1121/10.0035840.
This study validates a fast measure for spatial release from masking-minimum angular separation (MAS), the smallest spatial separation between a target and two-talker maskers to improve speech intelligibility by 20%. Three psychophysical methods to estimate MAS were compared, including the constant stimuli, adaptive staircase, and progressive tracking, which revealed no significant difference in the estimated threshold on the group level with bootstrapping. Results suggest that the MAS measurement can be expedited using the progressive tracking method without compromising robustness in the threshold estimation. The non-linear relationship between target-masker spatial separation, signal-to-noise ratio, and accuracy is explored.
本研究验证了一种用于掩蔽空间释放的快速测量方法——最小角度分离（MAS），即目标与双说话者掩蔽声之间的最小空间分离，以将言语可懂度提高20%。比较了三种估计MAS的心理物理学方法，包括恒定刺激法、自适应阶梯法和渐进跟踪法，通过自举法发现在组水平上估计阈值无显著差异。结果表明，使用渐进跟踪法可以加快MAS测量，而不会损害阈值估计的稳健性。还探讨了目标-掩蔽声空间分离、信噪比和准确性之间的非线性关系。
