Title: Neural Correlates of Informational Masking in Cocktail Party Situations

Introduction The cocktail party effect refers to situations in which people must segregate auditory sources. One situation of interest is speech-in-speech comprehension, in which two types of masking are described: energetic masking produced when target and noise partially overlap in time and frequency; informational masking occurs when information from concurrent flows is of comparable nature. Typically, informational masking is observed when target and background are speech sounds and it has been shown to emerge at different levels of competitions, namely acoustic-phonetic and lexical (Boulenger et al., 2010; Hoen et al., 2007). Using fMRI, Scott et al. (2004) showed increased activations in temporal superior gyrus associated with informational masking, whereas energetic masking involved a network including right posterior parietal cortex, left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left frontal pole. The aim of our study is to further characterize cortical networks involved in informational masking.