Auditory motion as a cue for source segregation and selection in a “cocktail party” listening environment

Abstract

Source motion was examined as a cue for segregating concurrent speech or noise sources. In two different headphone-based tasks—motion detection (MD) and speech-on-speech masking (SI)—one source among three was designated as the target only by imposing sinusoidal variation in azimuth during the stimulus presentation. For MD, the lstener was asked which of the three concurrent sources was in motion during the trial. For SI, the listener was asked to report the words spoken by the moving speech source. MD performance improved as the amplitude of the sinusoidal motion (i.e., displacement in azimuth) increased over the range of values tested (±5° to ±30°) for both modulated noise and speech targets, with better performance found for speech. SI performance also improved as the amplitude of target motion increased. Furthermore, SI performance improved as word position progressed throughout the sentence. Performance on the MD task was correlated with performance on SI task across individual subjects. For the SI conditions tested here, these findings are consistent with the proposition that listeners first detect the moving target source, then focus attention on the target location as the target sentence unfolds.