Gender in the Cocktail Party Effect: Listener,Target Speaker,and Distractor Genders Examined

Abstract

This study was designed to identify any effects of listener gender in the “cocktail party effect,” in which the gender of target and distractor voices has been shown to effect a listener's ability to detect and correctly respond to commands given in a multiple simultaneous talker task. Two experiments demonstrated that although there is no main effect of listener gender in any performance measure, the gender of the listener does interact with the genders of the target and distractor talkers in some conditions. This finding is potentially relevant to the customization of acoustic displays for maximum effectiveness with users of either gender.