The cocktail party effect with conversational speech
James Kondash, Robert H. Gilkey, Scott Isabelle, Brian D. Simpson · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1999
Most often the cocktail party effect has been evaluated for relatively simple stimuli (e.g., isolated words or simple sentences masked by noise) in anechoic environments. Here, a stimulus situation is used which is similar to that employed by Plomp [Acustica 34, 200–211 (1976)] (i.e., continuous discourse for both target and masker) in a reverberant room. However, instead of asking subjects to make a subjective judgment of intelligibility, the ‘‘tracking procedure’’ of DeFillipo and Scott is used [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 63, 1186–1192 (1978)] to simulate a conversation. This procedure measures the number of words per minute (WPM) successfully transmitted between the target talker and the subject. Preliminary results show increases in WPM of about 20% when the masker is separated from the target by 90 deg in the horizontal plane relative to the case when both the target and masker are at the same location in front of the subject. (The change in S/N necessary to maintain constant WPM between these conditions indicates that the magnitude of the effect is similar to that observed by Plomp.) Separating the target and masker(s) in elevation has little effect on WPM. [Work supported by AFOSR and the Ohio Board of Regents.]