Abstract
The link between lifetime noise exposure and temporal processing abilities was investigated for 45 normal-hearing participants, recruited from a population of undergraduate students, aged 18 to 23 years. A self-report instrument was employed to assess the amount of neuropathic noise (here defined as sounds with levels exceeding approximately 80 dBA) each participant had been exposed to and sensitivity to temporal-fine-structure and temporal-envelope information was determined using frequency discrimination and envelope irregularity detection tasks, respectively. Despite sizable individual variability in all measures, correlations between noise exposure and the ability to process temporal cues were small and non-significant.
Highlights
Seminal work by Kujawa and Liberman (2009) has shown that exposing mice to noise that produces a temporary threshold shift can result in loss of synapses between the inner hair cells in the cochlea and the auditory nerve fibers that innervate them; this is called cochlear synaptopathy
It has been speculated that cochlear synaptopathy might occur in human ears after repeated exposure to high-level noise [e.g., Plack et al (2014) and Liberman et al (2016)]
There is some evidence for a link between exposure to leisure or occupational noise and speech perception in young audiometrically normal-hearing listeners [e.g., Kumar et al (2012) and Liberman et al (2016)], but this has not been found in several other studies [e.g., Prendergast et al (2017), Guest et al (2018b), Grose et al (2017), and Yeend et al (2017)]
Summary
Seminal work by Kujawa and Liberman (2009) has shown that exposing mice to noise that produces a temporary threshold shift (as assessed using auditory brainstem responses) can result in loss of synapses between the inner hair cells in the cochlea and the auditory nerve fibers that innervate them; this is called cochlear synaptopathy. As a consequence of cochlear synaptopathy, fewer auditory nerve fibers convey information from the cochlea to the brain, resulting in reduced fidelity of the neural representation of the properties of sounds (Oxenham, 2016) This may affect the ability to discriminate subtle changes in sounds and to understand speech in noisy situations. It has been speculated that cochlear synaptopathy might occur in human ears after repeated exposure to high-level noise [e.g., Plack et al (2014) and Liberman et al (2016)] This might contribute to the surprisingly large individual variability in speech perception in challenging listening conditions observed for young participants with normal audiometric thresholds [e.g., Ruggles et al (2011) and Oberfeld and Klo€ckner-Nowotny (2016)]. There is some evidence for a link between exposure to leisure or occupational noise and speech perception in young audiometrically normal-hearing listeners [e.g., Kumar et al (2012) and Liberman et al (2016)], but this has not been found in several other studies [e.g., Prendergast et al (2017), Guest et al (2018b), Grose et al (2017), and Yeend et al (2017)]
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