Tomasz Letowski Andrea Tornatore Jeff Clark Barbara MacBeth
Dept. of Commun. Disord., Penn State Univ., 5 Moore Bldg., University Park, PA 16802
A large number of different multitalker noises (MTNs) is used in research and clinical applications. These noises differ in acoustical, semantic, and linguistic properties and, thus, may have different masking effectiveness. The authors compared acoustical characteristics and masking effectiveness of several MTNs recorded by the authors and by others. Both spectral and temporal differences have been observed among various MTNs. When noises of similar acoustic characteristics have been compared, the gender of the talkers but not the speech material affected masking effectiveness of the MTN.