A speech recognition system incorrectly transcribes "ice cream" as "I scream" in a noisy environment. Which mechanism explains why the system fails to accurately process the audio signal?

💡 Explanation

Acoustic masking occurs because background noise interferes with the distinct acoustic features of phonemes, hindering accurate feature extraction. Therefore, the system misinterprets the signal, rather than lexical priming, phonemic restoration, or top-down suppression being primary factors in this scenario.

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