Consistent and inconsistent interaural cues don't differ for tone detection but do dffer for speech recognition
Frederick J. Gallun, Rachel Ellinger, Kasey M. Jakien · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2017
In 1965, Dr. Colburn and his advisor, Dr. Durlach, whose wide and deep influence on the field of acoustics we honor in another Special Session at this meeting, conducted a seminal experiment on binaural hearing. This experiment showed that detection of a 500-Hz tone in broadband noise is improved equally well by a “consistent” arrangement, where an interaural difference in time (ITD) favors the same ear as does a simultaneously presented interaural difference in intensity (IID) as it is by an “inconsistent” arrangement, in which ITD favors one ear and IID the other. In 2008, Gallun et al. extended these results by showing that consistent and inconsistent differences are equally effective for tone detection in multitone maskers, even though the source of masking is clearly different. Here we present data from a speech recognition task performed in the presence of speech maskers where inconsistent interaural differences produced less release from masking than did consistent cues. These results argue for the importance of a perceived location cue for speech recognition tasks (at least of this type) that is not needed for tone detection.