Auditory motion as a cue for source segregation and selection in a "cocktail party" listening environment.

Source motion was examined as a cue for segregating concurrent speech or noise sources. In two different headphone-based tasks-motion detection (MD) and speech-on-speech masking (SI)-one source among three was designated as the target only by imposing sinusoidal variation in azimuth during the stimulus presentation. For MD, the lstener was asked which of the three concurrent sources was in motion during the trial.

Spectro-temporal weighting of interaural time differences in speech.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that the perceptual weighting of interaural time differences (ITDs) is non-uniform in time and frequency, leading to reports of spectral and temporal "dominance" regions. It is unclear however, how these dominance regions apply to spectro-temporally complex stimuli such as speech. The authors report spectro-temporal weighting functions for ITDs in a pair of naturally spoken speech tokens ("two" and "eight").

Binaural sensitivity and release from speech-on-speech masking in listeners with and without hearing loss.

Listeners with sensorineural hearing loss routinely experience less spatial release from masking (SRM) in speech mixtures than listeners with normal hearing. Hearing-impaired listeners have also been shown to have degraded temporal fine structure (TFS) sensitivity, a consequence of which is degraded access to interaural time differences (ITDs) contained in the TFS. Since these "binaural TFS" cues are critical for spatial hearing, it has been hypothesized that degraded binaural TFS sensitivity accounts for the limited SRM experienced by hearing-impaired listeners.