Effect of linguistic masker on the intelligibility of Mandarin sentences

The linguistic content of the masker is important for the benefit of masking release in understanding noise-corrupted speech. The present work investigated how Mandarin sentence recognition is influenced by background noise with different linguistic content via two studies, i.e., speech perception and intelligibility prediction. Mandarin sentences were corrupted by Mandarin-, Cantonese-, and English-speaking multi-talker (i.e., 2-talker and 6-talker) babbles at –5, –7.5 and –10 dB signal-to-noise ratios, and listening experiments were conducted to collect the intelligibility data of Mandarin sentence perception. Results showed that 1) the recognition of noise-corrupted Mandarin sentences was notably influenced by the linguistic content of background noise, with an increased influence from English, Cantonese to Mandarin; and 2) present intelligibility indices accounted modestly well for the variance of Mandarin sentence recognition when background noise contained different linguistic content.