MODULATION OF THE VOICE-CUING EFFECT ON RELEASING SPEECH FROM INFORMATIONAL MASKING

Abstract

In cocktail-party environments, familiarity or knowledge of target talker’s voice is useful for reducing speech-on-speech masking (Yang et al., 2007). This study investigated whether the voice-cuing effect can be modulated by either the degree of familiarity/knowledge of target talker’s voice or the onset asynchrony between target speech and masking speech. When target speech started 1 second after masking speech, pre-presenting a priming sentence voiced by the target talker significantly improved the recognition of the target speech which was co-presented with masking speech. However, reinforcing the familiarity/knowledge of the target-talker’s voice did not further improve the recognition. When target speech and masking speech started at the same time, a single presentation of voice-priming speech did not change participants’ speech recognition against masking speech unless the familiarity/knowledge of target-talker’s voice was reinforced by either a learning procedure or repeated presentation of the target-talker’ s voice before testing.