For normal-hearing listeners, speech intelligibility improves if speech and noise are spatially separated. While this spatial release from masking has already been quantified in normal-hearing listeners in many studies, it is less clear how spatial release from masking changes in cochlear implant listeners with and without access to low-frequency acoustic hearing. Spatial release from masking d...

Previous research has shown that frequency-specific estimates of auditory time constants for recovery from short-term adaptation can be made using a fixed-probe forward-masking procedure (Nelson & Freyman, 1987) if the masker and the probe stimuli are at the same frequency. This study examines the validity of time-constant estimates for off-frequency forward-masking conditions in which the mask...

Results were reported of psychophysical forward-masking experiments using a lateralization method. A general interpretation of masking was given, considering masking to be the combined result of three different mechanisms: the overlap mechanism, the adaptation mechanism, and the suppression mechanism. The aim of this study was to demonstrate the use of the lateralization method in a masking exp...

A new approach to the separation of speech from speech-in-noise mixtures is the use of time-frequency (T-F) masking. Originated in the field of computational auditory scene analysis, T-F masking performs separation in the time-frequency domain. This article introduces the T-F masking concept and reviews T-F masking algorithms that separate target speech from either monaural or binaural mixtures...

Speech recognition scores in noise are improved for some subjects who wear hearing aids that reduce low-frequency noise with an adjustable high-pass filter circuit. To evaluate whether these improvements were related to a reduction in upward spread of masking, pure-tone masking patterns for a low-frequency band-pass noise were measured in normal and hearing-impaired subjects. The filter skirt o...

A simultaneous masking procedure was used to derive four measures of frequency selectivity in the chinchilla. The first experiment measured critical masking ratios (CRs) at various signal frequencies. Estimates of the chinchillas' critical bandwidths derived from the CRs were much broader than comparable human estimates, indicating that the chinchilla may have inferior frequency selectivity. Th...

ABSTRACT In this paper single filter frequency-response masking FIR filters are introduced. The filters are based on the frequency-response masking approach, where the masking filters are replaced by instances of the same model filter, but with different periodicity. By having identical subfilters, except for periodicity, it is possible to map all subfilters to a single hardware structure using...

In this paper, a new numerical simulation approach is proposed for the study of open-loop frequency response of a chaotic masking system. Using Chua's circuit and the Lorenz system as illustrative examples, we have shown that one can employ chaos synchronization to separate the feedback network from a chaotic masking system, and then use numerical simulation to obtain the open-loop synchronizat...

Susceptibility to remote-frequency masking in children and adults was evaluated with respect to three stimulus features: (1) masker bandwidth, (2) spectral separation of the signal and masker, and (3) gated versus continuous masker presentation. Listeners were 4- to 6-year-olds, 7- to 10-year-olds, and adults. Detection thresholds for a 500-ms, 2000-Hz signal were estimated in quiet or presente...