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Journal of the Acoustical Society of America / Volume 122 / Issue 6 / JASA EXPRESS LETTERS

Perceiving the speech of multiple concurrent talkers in a combined divided and selective attention task

J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Volume 122, Issue 6, pp. EL229-EL235 (2007); (7 pages)

Valeriy Shafiro1 and Brian Gygi2

1Rush University Medical Center, Department of Communication Disorders and Sciences, 203 Senn, 1653 W. Congress Parkway, Chicago, Illinois 60612, USA
2East Bay Institute for Research and Education, 150 Muir Road, Martinez, California 94553, USA

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Detection and identification of concurrently spoken key words was investigated using the Coordinate Response Measure corpus. On every trial, listeners first had to explicitly detect callsign keywords in a multi-talker stimulus (divided attention), and, if all callsigns were present, identify the color and number words produced by one of the talkers (selective attention). Increasing the number of concurrent talkers and the number of callsigns to be detected each had a marked negative effect on detection and identification performance. These findings indicate that, when memory involvement is limited, listeners cannot reliably detect more than two concurrently spoken words in diotic listening.

© 2007 Acoustical Society of America

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Dr. Hillary Snapp and Blythe Holmes for their help with listener testing, Dr. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham for helpful comments on a previous version of the manuscript, and Drs. Neil Macmillan and Jim Jenkins for their advice on several design and analysis issues in this study.

Article Outline

  1. Introduction
  2. Method
    1. Stimuli and design
    2. Listeners and procedure
  3. Results
  4. Discussion

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KEYWORDS and PACS

Keywords

hearing, speech intelligibility

PACS

ARTICLE DATA

History
Received 27 Jul 2007
Accepted 14 Sep 2007
Revised 13 Sep 2007
Published online 05 Nov 2007
Digital Object Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.2806174

PUBLICATION DATA

ISSN

0001-4966 (print)  

Publisher

$abstract.society.value is a Member of CrossRef Acoustical Society of America

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Figures (1) Tables (1)

Figures (click on thumbnails to view enlargements)

FIG.1
The mean identification accuracy (Panel A) and target callsign sensitivity (Panel B) in each talker-sex configuration condition for each test session.

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