Location and acoustic scale cues in concurrent speech recognition

Location and acoustic scale cues have both been shown to have an effect on the recognition of speech in multi-speaker environments. This study examines the interaction of these variables. Subjects were presented with concurrent triplets of syllables from a target voice and a distracting voice, and asked to recognize a specific target syllable. The task was made more or less difficult by changing (a) the location of the distracting speaker, (b) the scale difference between the two speakers, and/or (c) the relative level of the two speakers. Scale differences were produced by changing the vocal tract length and glottal pulse rate during syllable synthesis: 32 acoustic scale differences were used. Location cues were produced by convolving head-related transfer functions with the stimulus. The angle between the target speaker and the distracter was 0 degrees, 4 degrees, 8 degrees, 16 degrees, or 32 degrees on the 0 degrees horizontal plane. The relative level of the target to the distracter was 0 or -6 dB. The results show that location and scale difference interact, and the interaction is greatest when one of these cues is small. Increasing either the acoustic scale or the angle between target and distracter speakers quickly elevates performance to ceiling levels.