Better-ear rating based on glimpsing

The better ear of a listener is the ear that benefits most from head shadow effects in a setting with spatially separated sources. Traditionally, the better ear is considered to be the ear that receives a signal at the best signal-to-noise ratio. For a speech target in interfering speech, the concept of rating the better ear based on glimpses was explored. The laterality of the expected better ear was shown to be well represented by metrics based on glimpsing. When employing better-ear glimpsing as a microscopic predictor for speech intelligibility, a strong relation was found between the amount of glimpsed target speech received by the better ear and the performance on a consonant recognition task. This relation was investigated for two spatial processing methods that included or excluded the possibility to use better-ear listening. It was shown that the amount of glimpses at the better ear plus an effect of angular separation of speech sources could account for a substantial part of the performance, but that a small, additional role of the contralateral ear may need to be considered.