Effectiveness of Two-Talker Maskers That Differ in Talker Congruity and Perceptual Similarity to the Target Speech.
Lauren Calandruccio, Emily Buss, Kristina Bowdrie
PMID 29169315WHAT IT FOUND
Listening to English sentences was hardest when one background talker also spoke English.
Adding a Dutch or reversed-English talker helped little. Recognition improved much more when both background talkers were unlike the target.
Key findings
01All-Dutch and all-time-reversed-English two-talker maskers were much easier than all-English maskers, with 73.7% and 66.4% correct versus 31.6% correct.
02If one masker talker spoke English like the target, adding a Dutch talker gave a significant improvement, but adding a time-reversed English talker did not.
03Listeners varied widely in how well they handled two-talker maskers, with variability on the order of 70 percentage points in several cases.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The participants were adults with normal hearing and native American English, so the results do not show how people with hearing loss or different languages would perform. The task was laboratory sentence repetition with recorded maskers, not everyday conversation, classroom listening, or a clinical outcome. Individual differences were large, with variability on the order of 70 percentage points across listeners in several cases, so group averages may not predict one patient. Experiment 2 excluded one listener because the threshold function fit poorly and another because of an experimental error. Experiment 3 analysed 14 of 18 listeners because four did not reach 50% performance at any tested background level. No intervention was tested; the work compared listening conditions.
Declared interests
The supplied text does not report funding or conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that adding a foreign-language or time-reversed background talker will make listening easier. In this study, a two-talker masker containing one English talker similar to the target was close to the all-English masker in effectiveness.