Hidden hearing loss and computational models of the auditory pathway: Predicting speech intelligibility decline

Abstract

Recent animal studies have shown that noise exposures cause a permanent loss of low spontaneous rate auditory nerve fibers (ANFs) and reduction of auditory brainstem response wave-I amplitudes (Kujawa and Liberman, 2009). This phenomenon is thought to create difficulties understanding speech in noise in humans, although there is currently no established clinical technique to measure cochlear synaptopathy. The goal of this research is to utilize computational models of the auditory periphery and auditory cortex to study the effect of low spontaneous rate ANF loss on the cortical representation of speech intelligibility in noise. The auditory-periphery model of Zilany et al. (2009, 2014) is used to make predictions of auditory nerve responses to speech stimuli in noise. The resulting cochlear neurogram, a spectrogram-like output based on ANF outputs, is then used as a foundation for two different but related cortical representations of speech: the Spectro-Temporal Modulation Index (STMI; Elihali et al., 200...