Vocal and semantic cues for the segregation of long concurrent speech stimuli in diotic and dichotic listening—The Long-SWoRD test

Abstract

It is not always easy to follow a conversation in a noisy environment. To distinguish between two speakers, a listener must mobilize many perceptual and cognitive processes to maintain attention on a target voice and avoid shifting attention to the background noise. The development of an intelligibility task with long stimuli—the Long-SWoRD test—is introduced. This protocol allows participants to fully benefit from the cognitive resources, such as semantic knowledge, to separate two talkers in a realistic listening environment. Moreover, this task also provides the experimenters with a means to infer fluctuations in auditory selective attention. Two experiments document the performance of normal-hearing listeners in situations where the perceptual separability of the competing voices ranges from easy to hard using a combination of voice and binaural cues. The results show a strong effect of voice differences when the voices are presented diotically. In addition, analyzing the influence of the semantic context on the pattern of responses indicates that the semantic information induces a response bias in situations where the competing voices are distinguishable and indistinguishable from one another.