Contributions of Auditory Stream Formation to Speech Perception

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The aim of this proposal is to get a detailed and quantitative understanding of the contribution of monaural and binaural grouping cues to speech intelligibility in multi-talker settings. For this purpose dedicated stimulus manipulations will be applied to multi-talker settings such that certain cues that may contribute to auditory stream segregation are rendered ineffective. The further aim will be to see to what extent speech intelligibility phenomena can be understood in a two-stage conceptual frame work. In the first stage it is assumed that speech intelligibility requires the availability of so-called glimpses, signifying small time-frequency intervals which in principle can be resolved temporally and spectrally by the auditory system and where the target speech has a favorable local signal-to-noise ratio. Although these glimpses are available in principle, because they can be resolved by the peripheral auditory system, it is still a major challenge for the more central auditory system to select the glimpses that belong to the target speaker. In the two-stage conceptual framework, monaural and binaural auditory grouping cues are assumed to be used in the second stage to accomplish this selection. In this study we seek to better understand the contribution of several of these grouping cues.