Hearing impairment is associated with enhanced neural tracking of the speech envelope

Decruy, Lien; Vanthornhout, Jonas; Francart, Tom

doi:10.1016/j.heares.2020.107961

Cited by 88 publications

(110 citation statements)

References 72 publications

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“…Petersen et al (2017) reported that adults with a higher degree of hearing loss showed a higher neural tracking of the ignored speech and no change in the attended stream, suggesting that they experience more difficulties inhibiting irrelevant information. Although Mirkovic et al (2019) and Presacco et al (2019) did not report a neural difference between the two populations, Decruy et al (2020) and Fuglsang et al (2020) observed, in contrast to Petersen et al (2017), an enhanced neural tracking in HI listeners for the attended-speech compared to their normal-hearing peers. This enhancement can indicate a compensation mechanism: HI listeners need to compensate for the degraded auditory input and therefore show increased cortical neural responses.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 61%

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Hearing loss is associated with delayed neural responses to continuous speech

Gillis

Decruy

Vanthornhout

et al. 2021

Preprint

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We investigated the impact of hearing loss on the neural processing of speech. Using a forward modelling approach, we compared the neural responses to continuous speech of 14 adults with sensorineural hearing loss with those of age-matched normal-hearing peers.Compared to their normal-hearing peers, hearing-impaired listeners had increased neural tracking and delayed neural responses to continuous speech in quiet. The latency also increased with the degree of hearing loss. As speech understanding decreased, neural tracking decreased in both population; however, a significantly different trend was observed for the latency of the neural responses. For normal-hearing listeners, the latency increased with increasing background noise level. However, for hearing-impaired listeners, this increase was not observed.Our results support that the neural response latency indicates the efficiency of neural speech processing. Hearing-impaired listeners process speech in silence less efficiently then normal-hearing listeners. Our results suggest that this reduction in neural speech processing efficiency is a gradual effect which occurs as hearing deteriorates. Moreover, the efficiency of neural speech processing in hearing-impaired listeners is already at its lowest level when listening to speech in quiet, while normal-hearing listeners show a further decrease in efficiently when the noise level increases.From our results, it is apparent that sound amplification does not solve hearing loss. Even when intelligibility is apparently perfect, hearing-impaired listeners process speech less efficiently.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 61%

“…To ensure a comfortable level, the overall level was adjusted on a subject-specific basis in addition to the linear amplification so that the stimulus was minimally effortful and comfortable to listen to. The individual presentation levels are reported by Decruy et al (2020).…”

Section: Stimuli Presentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hearing loss is associated with delayed neural responses to continuous speech

Gillis

Decruy

Vanthornhout

et al. 2021

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…Responses to the above mentioned features, and particularly responses to the speech envelope, have been studied quite extensively in recent years (e.g. ; Verschueren et al (2019); Decruy et al (2019Decruy et al ( , 2020). In contrast, research that analyses continuous responses with an f0-based feature (f0-tracking), targetting subcortical acoustic processing, is just emerging: Forte et al (2017) developed a method to process continuous f0 responses based on crosscorrelation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural tracking of the fundamental frequency of the voice: the effect of voice characteristics

Canneyt

Wouters

Francart

2020

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Traditional electrophysiological methods to study temporal auditory processing of the fundamental frequency of the voice (f0) often use unnaturally repetitive stimuli. In this study, we investigate f0 processing of meaningful continuous speech. EEG responses evoked by stories in quiet were analysed with a novel ’f0-tracking’ method that uses linear models to characterize both the strength and the spatiotemporal properties of the f0 response. Different samples of continuous speech (six stories by four speakers: two male and two female) were used to investigate stimulus effects on the f0 response. The results indicated stronger f0-tracking for the male-narrated stories compared to the female-narrated stories, for which many responses were not significant. Moreover, response strength was inversely related to the f0 of the speaker and the rate of f0 change throughout the story. These effects likely occur because phase-locking to the f0 is more challenging when the f0 is higher and/or more variable. From additional experiments, we conclude that female-narrated stories can be successfully used for continuous f0 responses but only if the rate of f0-change is low and the harmonic content is strong. Most natural female voices do not have these characteristics, so careful stimulus selection is required. The spatio-temporal analysis revealed a centrally-located peak response with latency between 7 and 12 ms for the female-narrated stories, suggestive of a brainstem source. In contrast, for male-narrated stories the analysis indicated at least two sources: one source with a latency of 13-15 ms, likely in the brainstem, and one right-dominant posterior temporal source with a latency of 23-25 ms, suggestive of the right primary auditory cortex. This adds to the growing evidence that auditory responses to frequencies in the lower range of the f0 (e.g. most male voices) do not originate solely from the brainstem but have additional cortical contributions. In conclusion, the novel f0-tracking method was successfully applied to a range of continuous speech samples and the findings on temporal processing of the f0 are in line with earlier findings from repetitive stimulus paradigms. The novel method is recommended over traditional paradigms because continuous speech is more relevant for day-to-day conversation and more engaging for the subjects, but also because the method allows for extensive analysis of both response strength and spatio-temporal characteristics.

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“…Several studies have examined effects of age (Presacco et al, 2016;Decruy et al, 2019;Zan et al, 2020) and hearing loss (Millman et al, 2017;Decruy et al, 2020) on continuous speech processing in the context of envelope tracking. Generally, these studies have demonstrated that older adults and those with hearing loss exhibit exaggerated cortical tracking of speech envelope both in quiet and in the presence of a competing speaker, as reflected by higher envelope reconstruction accuracies from delta-band EEG or MEG responses in these populations.…”

Section: Relationship To Existing Work On Age-effects On Electrophysimentioning

confidence: 99%

Amplified cortical tracking of word-level features of continuous competing speech in older adults

Mesík

Ray

Wojtczak

2020

Preprint

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Speech-in-noise comprehension difficulties are common among the elderly population, yet traditional objective measures of speech perception are largely insensitive to this deficit, particularly in the absence of clinical hearing loss. In recent years, a growing body of research in young normal-hearing adults has demonstrated that high-level features related to speech semantics and lexical predictability elicit strong centro-parietal negativity in the EEG signal around 400 ms following the word onset. Here we investigate effects of age on cortical tracking of these word-level features within a two-talker speech mixture, and their relationship with self-reported difficulties with speech-in-noise understanding. While undergoing EEG recordings, younger and older adult participants listened to a continuous narrative story in the presence of a distractor story. We then utilized forward encoding models to estimate cortical tracking of three speech features: 1) “semantic” dissimilarity of each word relative to the preceding context, 2) lexical surprisal for each word, and 3) overall word audibility. Our results revealed robust tracking of all three features for attended speech, with surprisal and word audibility showing significantly stronger contributions to neural activity than dissimilarity. Additionally, older adults exhibited significantly stronger tracking of surprisal and audibility than younger adults, especially over frontal electrode sites, potentially reflecting increased listening effort. Finally, neuro-behavioral analyses revealed trends of a negative relationship between subjective speech-in-noise perception difficulties and the model goodness-of-fit for attended speech, as well as a positive relationship between task performance and the goodness-of-fit, indicating behavioral relevance of these measures. Together, our results demonstrate the utility of modeling cortical responses to multi-talker speech using complex, word-level features and the potential for their use to study changes in speech processing due to aging and hearing loss.

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Hearing impairment is associated with enhanced neural tracking of the speech envelope

Cited by 88 publications

References 72 publications

Hearing loss is associated with delayed neural responses to continuous speech

Hearing loss is associated with delayed neural responses to continuous speech

Neural tracking of the fundamental frequency of the voice: the effect of voice characteristics

Amplified cortical tracking of word-level features of continuous competing speech in older adults

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