Auditory discrimination among speakers in the presence of masking noise

Subjects judged whether two masked utterances were spoken by the same or different speakers in an experiment designed to measure the influence of masking on speaker discrimination. Performance decreased from 80 percent correct judgments for a signal-to-noise ratio of +20 dB to 65 percent correct for a signal-to-noise ratio of -10 dB. Multidimensional scaling was used to determine speakers most sensitive to masking noise.