ISSN 1671-3710
CN 11-4766/R

Advances in Psychological Science ›› 2017, Vol. 25 ›› Issue (12): 2099-2110.doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1042.2017.02099

• Special Section of Physiological Psychology • Previous Articles     Next Articles

 The brain network mechanisms underlying perceptual unmasking cue-induced improvement of speech recognition under cocktail-party listening conditions

 LI Liang1; ZHENG Yingjun2; WU Chao3; LI Juanhua2; ZHANG Changxin4; LU Lingxi1   

  1.  (1 School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100080, China) (2 The Affiliated Brain Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University (Guangzhou Huiai Hospital), Guangzhou 510370, China) (3 School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China) (4 School of Education, China East Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China)
  • Received:2017-04-03 Online:2017-12-15 Published:2017-10-26
  • Contact: LI Liang, E-mail: liangli@pku.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
     

Abstract:   In a noisy environment with multiple-people talking, how does a listener use certain perceptual cues to facilitate recognition of target speech? To answer this “cocktail-party” problem, researchers have used brain-image methods to examine the underlying brain-network mechanisms. Recent studies have shown that using a unmasking cue, which is associated with a feature of target speech, is able to not only shorten the latency of the auditory cortical responses to a target-speech signal, but also facilitate activation and functional connection of the brain regions that are associated with both cue-specific and cue-nonspecific attention, speech expression, inhibitory functions, and speech motoring, thereby forming the brain-network foundation for the unmasking-cue-induced improvement of the target speech perception against speech informational masking.

Key words: cocktail-party problem, informational masking, unmasking, speech recognition, perceived spatial separation, auditory speech priming, visual speech priming, brain network, neuroimaging

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