Effects of noise and cue enhancement on neural responses to speech in auditory midbrain, thalamus and cortex

Abstract

Speech perception depends on the auditory system’s ability to extract relevant acoustic features from competing background noise. Despite widespread acknowledgement that noise exacerbates this process, little is known about the neurophysiologic mechanisms underlying the encoding of speech in noise. Moreover, the relative contribution of different brain nuclei to these processes has not been fully established. To address these issues, aggregate neural responses were recorded from within the inferior colliculus, medial geniculate body and over primary auditory cortex of anesthetized guinea pigs to a synthetic vowel–consonant–vowel syllable /ada/ in quiet and in noise. In noise the onset response to the stop consonant /d/ was reduced or eliminated at each level, to the greatest degree in primary auditory cortex. Acoustic cue enhancements characteristic of ‘clear’ speech (lengthening the stop gap duration and increasing the intensity of the release burst) improved the neurophysiologic representation of the consonant at each level, especially at the cortex. Finally, the neural encoding of the vowel segment was evident at subcortical levels only, and was more resistant to noise than encoding of the dynamic portion of the consonant (release burst and formant transition). This experiment sheds light on which speech-sound elements are poorly represented in noise and demonstrates how acoustic modifications to the speech signal can improve neural responses in a normal auditory system. Implications for understanding neurophysiologic auditory signal processing in children with perceptual impairments and the design of efficient perceptual training strategies are also discussed.