Auditory brainstem responses to anechoic and reverberant two-syllable speech sounds in elderly listeners

Abstract

Elderly listeners often complain of difficulty in understanding speech under reverberation. To investigate speech processing in elderly listeners’ auditory pathways, some studies have focused on auditory brainstem responses to speech sounds (speech ABRs). In an earlier study, we measured speech ABRs to the speech sound /da/ in elderly listeners and reported that listeners with low word intelligibility under reverberation showed small amplitudes in their speech ABRs to a formants frequency of/da/ (Fujihira & Shiraishi, 2015). Reverberation is a phenomenon that causes speech sounds to overlap with following speech sounds. Therefore, the effects of reverberation on multiple syllables might be larger than those on one syllable. In present study, we measured the speech ABRs to the two-syllable sound /dada/ in 27 elderly listeners and investigated the difference between the speech ABRs to the first syllable and the second syllable in anechoic and reverberant conditions. The results showed that the amplitudes of...