Effect of number of masking talkers on speech-on-speech masking in Chinese

In this study, targets were nonsense sentences spoken by a Chinese female, and maskers were nonsense sentences spoken by other 1, 2, 3, or 4 Chinese females. All stimuli were presented by two spatially separated loudspeakers. Using the precedence effect, manipulation of the delay between the two loudspeakers for the masker determined whether the target and masker were perceived as coming from the same or different locations. The results show that the masking effect remarkably increased with the number of masking talkers increased progressively from 1 to 4, which is also confirmed by the calculation of the speech intelligibility index. However, the perceived spatial separation, which predominantly reduced informational masking, caused the largest improvement in speech identification with the two-talker masker, indicating that two-voice speech had the highest informational masking impact. Some differences between Chinese speech masking and English speech masking were discussed.