Spectral weighting for sentence recognition in steady-state and amplitude-modulated noise

Abstract

Spectral weights in octave-frequency bands from 0.25 to 4 kHz were estimated for speech-in-noise recognition using two sentence materials (i.e., the IEEE and AzBio sentences). The masking noise was either unmodulated or sinusoidally amplitude-modulated at 8 Hz. The estimated spectral weights did not vary significantly across two test sessions and were similar for the two sentence materials. Amplitude-modulating the masker increased the weight at 2 kHz and decreased the weight at 0.25 kHz, which may support an upward shift in spectral weights for temporally fluctuating maskers.