Differential effects of hearing loss on neural and behavioral measures of speech perception in noise

Abstract

Understanding speech in background noise is difficult for many listeners, and those with hearing impairment tend to show considerable variability in performance. Event-related potentials (ERPs) and associated cortical oscillations are useful for examining neural responses to speech in various listening conditions and may represent neurophysiological markers of auditory perception. The present study examined the effects of hearing impairment on the neural coding and perception of speech in noise in a group of adult listeners with varying degrees of sensorineural hearing loss. This work was also designed to determine whether cortical ERPs and oscillatory rhythms in various frequency bands can predict the effects of hearing impairment on sentence recognition in noise. Passive N1-P2 and MMN responses were elicited with a double-oddball paradigm containing a consonant and vowel change in background noise. Speech perception was evaluated using phoneme discrimination and sentence recognition in noise tasks. Anal...