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Informational Masking in Speech Recognition

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The Auditory System at the Cocktail Party

Part of the book series: Springer Handbook of Auditory Research ((SHAR,volume 60))

Abstract

Solving the “cocktail party problem” depends on segregating, selecting, and comprehending the message of one specific talker among competing talkers. This chapter reviews the history of study of speech-on-speech (SOS) masking, highlighting the major ideas influencing the development of theories that have been proposed to account for SOS masking. Much of the early work focused on the role of spectrotemporal overlap of sounds, and the concomitant competition for representation in the auditory nervous system, as the primary cause of masking (termed energetic masking). However, there were some early indications—confirmed and extended in later studies—of the critical role played by central factors such as attention, memory, and linguistic processing. The difficulties related to these factors are grouped together and referred to as informational masking. The influence of methodological issues—in particular the need for a means of designating the target source in SOS masking experiments—is emphasized as contributing to the discrepancies in the findings and conclusions that frequent the history of study of this topic. Although the modeling of informational masking for the case of SOS masking has yet to be developed to any great extent, a long history of modeling binaural release from energetic masking has led to the application/adaptation of binaural models to the cocktail party problem. These models can predict some, but not all, of the factors that contribute to solving this problem. Some of these models, and their inherent limitations, are reviewed briefly here.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Irwin Pollack (2002; personal communication) attributed his use of the term “informational masking” to influential comments by George A. Miller at a seminar presented by Pollack describing the masking of speech by bands of filtered noise. According to Pollack, Miller objected to (Pollack’s) use of noise as a masker considering its effects to be “secondary” to the “informational content of the messages” contained in speech maskers.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are indebted to Christine Mason for her comments on this chapter and for her assistance with its preparation. Thanks also to Elin Roverud and Jing Mi for providing comments on an earlier version and to the members of the Psychoacoustics Laboratory, Sargent College graduate seminar SLH 810, and Binaural Group for many insightful discussions of these topics. We are also grateful to those authors who generously allowed their figures to be reprinted here and acknowledge the support of the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders and Air Force Office of Scientific Research for portions of the research described here.

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Gerald Kidd, Jr. declares that he has no conflict of interest.

H. Steven Colburn declares that he has no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, Hearing Research Center, Boston University, 635 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    Gerald Kidd Jr.

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hearing Research Center, Boston University, 44 Cummington Street, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    H. Steven Colburn

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  1. Gerald Kidd Jr.
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Correspondence to Gerald Kidd Jr. .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California at Irvine Department of Otolaryngology, Irvine, California, USA

    John C. Middlebrooks

  2. University of Maryland Dept Electrical and Computer Engineering, College Park, Maryland, USA

    Jonathan Z. Simon

  3. Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA

    Arthur N. Popper

  4. Marine Biological Laboratory , Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA

    Richard R. Fay

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Kidd, G., Colburn, H.S. (2017). Informational Masking in Speech Recognition. In: Middlebrooks, J., Simon, J., Popper, A., Fay, R. (eds) The Auditory System at the Cocktail Party. Springer Handbook of Auditory Research, vol 60. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51662-2_4

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