Early auditory responses to speech sounds in Parkinson’s disease: preliminary data

Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD), as a manifestation of basal ganglia dysfunction, is associated with a number of speech deficits, including reduced voice modulation and vocal output. Interestingly, previous work has shown that participants with PD show an increased feedback-driven motor response to unexpected fundamental frequency perturbations during speech production, and a heightened ability to detect differences in vocal pitch relative to control participants. Here, we explored one possible contributor to these enhanced responses. We recorded the frequency-following auditory brainstem response (FFR) to repetitions of the speech syllable [da] in PD and control participants. Participants with PD displayed a larger amplitude FFR related to the fundamental frequency of speech stimuli relative to the control group. The current preliminary results suggest the dysfunction of the basal ganglia in PD contributes to the early stage of auditory processing and may reflect one component of a broader sensorimotor processing impairment associated with the disease.

Bats experience age-related hearing loss (presbycusis)

“…Age-related hearing loss or presbycusis is a hallmark of aging and has been described in multiple species, including mice, humans ( Kujoth et al, 2005 ), gerbils ( Gates & Mills, 2005 ), rats, cats, and primates ( Langemann et al, 1999 ). The neural processing of sound relies on a complex interplay of excitatory and inhibitory interactions ( Parthasarathy & Kujawa, 2018 ; Mollaei et al, 2022 ), with age-related hearing loss usually arising from irreversible damage in the inner ear, specifically the cochlea, where sound is transduced into electrical signals ( Wu et al, 2020 ). The cochlea is organized tonotopically, maximally responsive to high frequencies at the basal end and low frequencies at the apical end ( Anderson et al, 2018 ).…”