Exploring the relationship between task difficulty, head-related transfer function and spatial release from masking in a speech-on-speech experiment
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Vicente, Thibault
González-Toledo, Daniel
Cuevas-Rodríguez, María
Molina-Tanco, Luis
Reyes-Lecuona, Arcadio
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
It is known that individuals make use of spatial hearing cues to improve the audibility of a target signal and separate it from competing sounds. This phenomenon is known as spatial release from masking (SRM). Recent research has shown that this happens also when sources are located in the median plane, where interaural differences are limited. When assessing this within virtual conditions, it has been shown that employing individually measured head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) results in higher SRM abilities compared to using non-individual filters. In a previously published work, we found that Spanish speakers benefit from individual HRTFs when discriminating a target English speech from a single masker in the median plane. This study replicates the protocol of that previous work, varying the number of maskers and participants’ English proficiency levels to explore relationships among task difficulty and HRTF use. Results from a first experiment show that English speakers behave differently to Spanish ones; their SRM advantage is not significant. We suggest that this is due to their language proficiency, which allows them to rely on spectral glimpsing alone, that is, exploiting spectro-temporal gaps between voices rather than spectral cues introduced by spatial separation. A second experiment introduces a second speech masker, co-located with the first; by making the task more complex, participants seem to increase their reliance on spatial cues, resulting in significant effects of masker position and HRTF. This highlights a trade-off between the use of target glimpsing and spatial cues and the need for further exploration into how task difficulty influences SRM with different HRTFs.
Date Issued
2026-01-01
Date Acceptance
2025-11-25
Citation
Hearing Research, 2026, 470
ISSN
0378-5955
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Journal / Book Title
Hearing Research
Volume
470
Copyright Statement
© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
License URL
Identifier
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/41365237
PII: S0378-5955(25)00307-7
Subjects
Intelligibility
Spatial audio
Task difficulty
Humans
Perceptual Masking
Speech Perception
Female
Male
Cues
Acoustic Stimulation
Young Adult
Adult
Noise
Sound Localization
Auditory Threshold
Head
Speech Acoustics
Speech Intelligibility
Language
Audiometry, Speech
Publication Status
Published
Coverage Spatial
Netherlands
Article Number
109490
Date Publish Online
2025-12-06