Knowledge Bank

Informational masking occurs when speech is masked by conversational babble and affects both peripheral auditory processing and central perceptual processing. Recent studies indicate that linguistic interference contributes to informational masking but provide little information about the significant linguistic characteristics of the interference. To further examine the source of linguistic interference, this study examines whether dialect differences between multi-talker babble used as a masker and the target sentence change the effectiveness of the masker. Listeners were presented with target sentences mixed with one of each of two dialect babbles at three different levels of signal to babble ratios (S/B ratios): +5, 0 and -5 dB. Results indicated, as expected, that performance decreased significantly as the S/B ratio was decreased but there was no significant difference as a function of the number of talkers in the babble. The dialect of the babble matched to the dialect of the speaker produced significantly more masking than did the babble in the contrasting dialect (especially in the 0 dB context).