Individual Differences and Age Effects in a Dichotic Informational Masking Paradigm

Overview

Journal J Acoust Soc Am

Publisher American Institute of Physics

Specialty Otorhinolaryngology

Date 2010 Jul 24

PMID 20649222

Citations 31

Authors

Frederic L Wightman

Doris J Kistler

Amanda OBryan

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Sixty normally-hearing listeners, ages 5 to 61 years, participated in a monaural speech understanding task designed to assess the impact of a single-talker speech masker presented to the opposite ear. The speech targets were masked by ipsilateral speech-spectrum noise. Masker level was fixed and target level was varied to estimate psychometric functions. The target/masker ratio that led to 51% correct performance in this task was taken as the baseline threshold. The impact of a modulated speech-spectrum noise, a male talker, or a female talker presented at a fixed level to the contralateral ear was quantified by the change in the baseline threshold and was assumed to reflect informational masking. The modulated-noise masker produced no informational masking across the entire age range. Speech maskers produced as much as 20 dB of informational masking for children aged 5-8 years and only 4 dB for adults. In contrast with previous studies using ipsilateral speech maskers, the male and female contralateral speech maskers produced comparable informational masking. Analyses of the developmental rate of change for informational masking and of the patterns of individual differences suggest that the informational masking produced by contralateral and ipsilateral maskers may be mediated by different mechanisms or processes.

Citing Articles

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Gransier R, van Wieringen A, Wouters J J Assoc Res Otolaryngol. 2022; 23(3):413-426.

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Spatial release from masking in reverberation for school-age children.

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Hemodynamic Responses Link Individual Differences in Informational Masking to the Vicinity of Superior Temporal Gyrus.

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Dichotic listening performance with cochlear-implant simulations of ear asymmetry is consistent with difficulty ignoring clearer speech.

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Listener characteristics differentially affect self-reported and physiological measures of effort associated with two challenging listening conditions.

Francis A, Bent T, Schumaker J, Love J, Silbert N Atten Percept Psychophys. 2021; 83(4):1818-1841.

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