Cocktail party situations involve multiple concurrent talkers, making listening perceptually and cognitively demanding. Whereas in a static cocktail party situation the talker of interest remains the same, dynamic situations include unpredictable switches of the target talker (e.g., Brungart and Simpson, 2007). In static situations, listeners have to focus attention on the known target and ignore competing talkers. In addition to this, dynamic situations also require monitoring multiple potential targets and switching the attentional focus from one talker to another, hence they are assumed to be more cognitively challenging than static situations (Lin and Carlile, 2015). In order to shed light on the attentional mechanisms in static and dynamic cocktail party situations, we conducted an analysis of error types that occur during multi-talker speech recognition. The cocktail party situations involved three spatially separated competing talkers with different voice characteristics who uttered matrix sentences. Differentiating between target-masker confusions and random errors, we aimed at obtaining insights about how attention is focused on the talkers. Using a more fine-grained analysis of confusion errors, we examined the occurrence of talker biasing effects, that is, if the listeners have the tendency to focus their attention on the previous target after a switch of the target (cf. Lin and Carlile, 2019). Furthermore, to investigate potential effects of aging and hearing status, data of three listener groups were compared, including young as well as older listeners with and without hearing loss. Finally, based on the models of auditory scene analysis (Bregman, 1990) and auditory attention (Shinn-Cunningham, 2008), we discuss in how far the observed error types indicate the existence of the proposed mechanisms.

Acknowledgement: Supported by a grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to HM (ME-2751.3-1).

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