The possible role of early-stage phase-locked neural activities in speech-in-noise perception in human adults across age and hearing loss

Abstract

Ageing affects auditory neural phase-locked activities which could increase the challenges experienced during speech-in-noise (SiN) perception by older adults. However, evidence for how ageing affects SiN perception through these phase-locked activities is still lacking. It is also unclear whether influences of ageing on phase-locked activities in response to different acoustic properties have similar or different mechanisms to affect SiN perception. The present study addressed these issues by measuring early-stage phase-locked encoding of speech under quiet and noisy backgrounds (speech-shaped noise (SSN) and multi-talker babbles) in adults across a wide age range (19–75 years old). Participants passively listened to a repeated vowel whilst the frequency-following response (FFR) to fundamental frequency that has primary subcortical sources and cortical phase-locked response to slowly-fluctuating acoustic envelopes were recorded. We studied how these activities are affected by age and age-related hearing loss and how they are related to SiN performances (word recognition in sentences in noise). First, we found that the effects of age and hearing loss differ for the FFR and slow-envelope phase-locking. FFR was significantly decreased with age and high-frequency (≥ 2 kHz) hearing loss but increased with low-frequency (< 2 kHz) hearing loss, whilst the slow-envelope phase-locking was significantly increased with age and hearing loss across frequencies. Second, potential relationships between the types of phase-locked activities and SiN perception performances were also different. We found that the FFR and slow-envelope phase-locking positively corresponded to SiN performance under multi-talker babbles and SSN, respectively. Finally, we investigated how age and hearing loss affected SiN perception through phase-locked activities via mediation analyses. We showed that both types of activities significantly mediated the relation between age/hearing loss and SiN perception but in distinct manners. Specifically, FFR decreased with age and high-frequency hearing loss which in turn contributed to poorer SiN performance but increased with low-frequency hearing loss which in turn contributed to better SiN performance under multi-talker babbles. Slow-envelope phase-locking increased with age and hearing loss which in turn contributed to better SiN performance under both SSN and multi-talker babbles. Taken together, the present study provided evidence for distinct neural mechanisms of early-stage auditory phase-locked encoding of different acoustic properties through which ageing affects SiN perception.