Behavior and speech intelligibility in a changing multi-talker environment

At the auditory cocktail party, we often listen to speech coming from different directions. This project aims to investigate how behavior and speech perception interact when people have different goals when listening in an acoustically complex scene. In the experiment, participants stand in a simulated reverberant room and listen to target sentences of one talker from random directions in the horizontal plane. The interferers are presented in an ongoing fashion clustered in front of the participant but the participants can move during the presentation of the sentence. At the beginning of each trial, the scene is reset to be aligned with the current orientation of the participant. The experiment aims to test behavior without restricting the participant with instructions to move in a certain way and test the effect of visual cues. Stimuli are presented in free-field using the real-time Simulated Open Field Environment. The movement behavior is recorded using a video-based motion-tracking system, and the motion data are analyzed in relation to target position and visual conditions. The results are discussed in the context of developing realistic listening scenes for psychoacoustical and audiological research.