Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 10, 2026

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
Masking release due to linguistic and phonetic dissimilarity between the target and masker speech
Lauren Calandruccio1, Susanne Brouwer, Kristin J Van Engen
1Queens College of the City University of New York, Flushing, USA. lauren_calandruccio@med.unc.edu
Purpose:
To investigate masking release for speech maskers for linguistically and phonetically close (English and Dutch) and distant (English and Mandarin) language pairs.
Method:
Thirty-two monolingual speakers of English with normal audiometric thresholds participated in the study. Data are reported for an English sentence recognition task in English and for Dutch and Mandarin competing speech maskers (Experiment 1) and noise maskers (Experiment 2) that were matched either to the long-term average speech spectra or to the temporal modulations of the speech maskers from Experiment 1.
Results:
Listener performance increased as the target-to-masker linguistic distance increased (English-in-English < English-in-Dutch < English-in-Mandarin).
Conclusion:
Spectral differences between maskers can account for some, but not all, of the variation in performance between maskers; however, temporal differences did not seem to play a significant role.
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