Chinese speech identification in multi-talker babble with diotic and dichotic listening

Abstract

To explore Chinese Mandarin speech identification in babble of spatially separated talkers, subjective speech identification tests of word and sentence were made with diotic and dichotic listening respectively. The result shows that the speech identification scores changed non-monotonically with the masker number N increasing from 1 to infinity, first declining gradually until reaching their minimums and then rising. Statistical difference was found between the scores of diotic and dichotic listening. For all the values of N checked, dichotic listening achieved higher scores than diotic listening, showing that dichotic effect has an advantage for reducing babble masking. And the scores of sentence test are significantly higher than that of word test with whether diotic or dichotic listening, indicating that the linguistic connection in sentence can help listeners get a better perception of the target speech in babble masking. © 2012 The Author(s).