Effect of contralateral noise on energetic and informational masking on speech-in-speech intelligibility

This experiment tested the advantage of binaural presentation of an interfering noise in a task involving identification of monaurally-presented words. These words were embedded in three types of noise: a stationary noise, a speech-modulated noise and a speech-babble noise, in order to assess energetic and informational masking contributions to binaural unmasking. Our results showed important informational masking in the monaural condition, principally due to lexical and phonetic competition. We also found a binaural unmasking effect, which was more important when speech was used as interferer, suggesting that this suppressive effect was more efficient in the case of high-level informational (lexical and phonetic) competition.