Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Benefits Of Spatial Separation On The Cortical Representations Of Speech Sounds, Benjamin H. Zobel

Doctoral Dissertations

Spatial separation between competing speech streams reduces their confusion (informational masking) and improves speech processing under challenging listening conditions. The precise stages of auditory processing and the bottom-up and top-down mechanisms involved in this spatial release from informational masking are not fully understood. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to measure the cortical processing of relevant speech under conditions of informational masking and its spatial release, and to examine the preattentive and attentive mechanisms that benefit listeners. Participants were asked to detect noise-vocoded target speech presented with noise-vocoded two-talker masking speech. In separate conditions, the same set of targets were spatially …