Simultaneous monotic masking as a function of linguistic violations.

An investigation was conducted to determine whether grammatical, semantical, and phonological constraints affect aural masking. The rationale centered around the non-representative and non-optimal characteristics of white noise as a masker. Also, prior conclusions that content and linguistic rules do not influence masking warranted examination. Six lists, each of 25 simultaneously competing message of 36 college-age, normal hearing, native speakers of English. The 6 classes of competing messages were forward grammatical strings, forward semantically anomalous strings, forward ungrammatical strings, and the same 3 sets reproduced backwards. Articulation scores computed in percentages served as measures. Performances when the forward semantically anomalous strings and the forward ungrammatical strings functioned as maskers were depressed relative to the other conditions and not significantly different from each other.