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New paper in press in JASA: Kre­it­e­wolf et al. on the role of voice-fea­ture con­ti­nu­ity for cock­tail-par­ty listening

Oble­ser­lab post­doc Jens Kre­it­e­wolf is in press in The Jour­nal of the Acousti­cal Soci­ety of America!

Togeth­er with our col­leagues, Marc Schön­wies­ner (Montreal/Leipzig), Samuel Math­ias (Yale), and Régis Tra­peau (Montreal/Marseille), we inves­ti­gat­ed the roles of two of the most salient voice fea­tures, glot­tal-pulse rate (GPR) and vocal-tract length (VTL), for per­cep­tu­al group­ing in the cock­tail par­ty. Using care­ful­ly con­trolled stim­uli, we show that lis­ten­ers exploit con­ti­nu­ity in both voice fea­tures to solve the cock­tail-par­ty prob­lem, but that VTL con­ti­nu­ity plays a stronger role for per­cep­tu­al group­ing than GPR con­ti­nu­ity. Our find­ings are in line with the dif­fer­en­tial impor­tance of VTL and GPR for the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of nat­ur­al talk­ers and have clin­i­cal­ly rel­e­vant impli­ca­tions for cock­tail-par­ty lis­ten­ing in cochlear-implant users.

Data were record­ed using the Dome at BRAMS dur­ing Jens’ ACN Eras­mus Mundus exchange in Montreal.

The paper is avail­able as preprint:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/30/379545