Who hides behind the masks at the cocktail party? Behavioral assessment of different types of interferences occurring during speech-in-noise comprehension
Michel Hoen, Claire-Léonie Grataloup, Nicolas Grimault, Fabien Perrin, François Pellegrino.

Up to now speech in noise comprehension and more particularly speech in concurrent speech sounds was rarely studied in the domain of psycholinguistics. In this paper we report a study interested in the differential effects of different types of speech derived noises as multi-talker cocktail party sounds and their time-reversed pendent on the comprehension of isolated words. Results suggest that different levels of linguistic information from concurrent speech signals can compete with linguistic information in the target signal, mainly depending on the spectral saturation caused by the increasing number of voices in concurrent signals. These results suggest linguistically specific participations in informational masking effects occurring in the context of speech in speech comprehension.