Acoustic and Non-Acoustic Effects on Speech Intelligibility during Reverberant, Spatialised Two-Talker Listening Scenarios

In two-talker situations, listeners need to segregate a stream of interest (target speech) from a second stream (distractor speech). Our auditory system utilizes several spectro-temporal cues that support successful stream segregation and intelligibility of the target speaker. As most of these cues were investigated in dry listening environments, potential behavioral effects from reverberation are less clear. Reverberations induce distortions by disrupting fine, transient cues of the sound signal. On the other hand, reverberations offer distance-related cues and listeners might employ different listening strategies to compensate for the signal degradation. Here, we aimed at 1) replicating previous f indings of spatial unmasking in naturalistic environments including reverberation and 2), investigating potential effects of relative distance and adaptation of listening strategies to current stimuli. We find that distance-related cues aid intelligibility when no other binaural cues are present. In addition, our results indicate different attentional strategies that are adopted implicitly when being presented with a spatially fixed target or spatially fixed masker. We find that while not providing the maximum performance in anechoic conditions, the strategy adopted for a spatially fixed masker appears to be more robust against reverberation in contrast to a location-based strategy.