Masked speech perception across the adult lifespan: Impact of age and hearing impairment

Goossens, Tine; Vercammen, Charlotte; Wouters, Jan; Wieringen, Astrid Van

doi:10.1016/j.heares.2016.11.004

Cited by 78 publications

(99 citation statements)

References 112 publications

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“…Prior to measuring neural envelope tracking, we also assessed the effect of hearing impairment on speech understanding in noise. In line with previous studies, our behavioral results demonstrate that persons with sensorineural hearing loss obtain less benefit from listening in the gaps of a fluctuating masker, despite having access to amplification (Festen and Plomp, 1990;Goossens et al, 2017;Shinn-Cunningham and Best, 2008).…”

Section: Hearing Impairment Is More Detrimental When Speech Is Embeddsupporting

confidence: 92%

“…At the peripheral level, outer hair cell dysfunction also causes reduced frequency resolution, resulting in a distorted output of the cochlea which makes a segregation between speech and noise at the subsequent levels of the auditory system more difficult (Dillon, 2001;Hopkins and Moore, 2011). In addition, several studies have shown that HI adults benefit less from listening in the gaps when speech is embedded in the presence of fluctuating maskers (Festen and Plomp, 1990;Goossens et al, 2017;Shinn-Cunningham and Best, 2008). It is suggested that a deficient temporal processing of both low-(envelope) and high-frequency (temporal fine-structure; TFS) modulations underlie these speech-in-noise difficulties.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Decruy

Vanthornhout

Francart

2018

Preprint

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Elevated hearing thresholds in hearing impaired adults are usually compensated by providing amplification through a hearing aid. In spite of restoring hearing sensitivity, difficulties with understanding speech in noisy environments often remain. One main reason is that sensorineural hearing loss not only causes loss of audibility but also other deficits, including peripheral distortion but also central temporal processing deficits. To investigate the neural consequences of hearing impairment in the brain underlying speech-in-noise difficulties, we compared EEG responses to natural speech of 14 hearing impaired adults with those of 14 age-matched normal-hearing adults. We measured neural envelope tracking to sentences and a story masked by different levels of a stationary noise or competing talker. Despite their sensorineural hearing loss, hearing impaired adults showed higher neural envelope tracking of the target than the competing talker, similar to their normal-hearing peers. Furthermore, hearing impairment was related to an additional increase in neural envelope tracking of the target talker, suggesting that hearing impaired adults may have an enhanced sensitivity to envelope modulations or require a larger differential tracking of target versus competing talker to neurally segregate speech from noise. Lastly, both normal-hearing and hearing impaired participants showed an increase in neural envelope tracking with increasing speech understanding. Hence, our results open avenues towards new clinical applications, such as neuro-steered prostheses as well as objective and automatic measurements of speech understanding performance.HighlightsAdults with hearing impairment can neurally segregate speech from background noiseHearing loss is related to enhanced neural envelope tracking of the target talkerNeural envelope tracking has potential to objectively measure speech understanding

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Section: Hearing Impairment Is More Detrimental When Speech Is Embeddsupporting

confidence: 92%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Decruy

Vanthornhout

Francart

2018

Preprint

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 53%

“…Moreover, middleaged individuals consistently reported more self-perceived hearing problems outside of the lab (as indicated by SSQ responses) as compared with younger adults. Taken as a whole, results across labs support the idea that individuals in middle age are especially susceptible to listening conditions with informational masking present, with further declines as people continue to age (Goossens, Vercammen, Wouters, & van Wieringen, 2017;Helfer & Freyman, 2014Helfer & Jesse, 2015).In accordance with the ELU, peripheral and suprathreshold auditory encoding degradations that occur as a result of aging affect the fidelity of incoming phonological representations, leading to the need for greater cognitive resources to segregate and attend to target speech information while inhibiting competing speech information. These deficits seem to begin in middle age even before significant pure-tone threshold elevation emerges on the audiogram.…”

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confidence: 53%

Age-Related Changes in Objective and Subjective Speech Perception in Complex Listening Environments

Helfer

Merchant

Wasiuk

2017

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose: A frequent complaint by older adults is difficulty communicating in challenging acoustic environments. The purpose of this work was to review and summarize information about how speech perception in complex listening situations changes across the adult age range. Method: This article provides a review of age-related changes in speech understanding in complex listening environments and summarizes results from several studies conducted in our laboratory. Results: Both degree of high frequency hearing loss and cognitive test performance limit individuals' ability to understand speech in difficult listening situations as they age. The performance of middle-aged adults is similar to that of younger adults in the presence of noise maskers, but they experience substantially more difficulty when the masker is 1 or 2 competing speech messages. For the most part, middle-aged participants in studies conducted in our laboratory reported as much self-perceived hearing problems as did older adult participants. Conclusions: Research supports the multifactorial nature of listening in real-world environments. Current audiologic assessment practices are often insufficient to identify the true speech understanding struggles that individuals experience in these situations. This points to the importance of giving weight to patients' self-reported difficulties. Presentation Video: http://cred.pubs.asha.org/article. aspx?articleid=2601619This research forum contains papers from the 2016 Research Symposium at the ASHA Convention held in Philadelphia, PA.T he primary complaint of most adults with hearing impairment is difficulty understanding speech in noisy situations (Committee on Hearing Bioacoustics and Biomechanics, 1988;Pichora-Fuller, 1997). The most problematic situations reported by patients tend to be those that involve more than one intelligible talker. This is consistent with research demonstrating that older adults perform poorer than younger adults on laboratory-based tasks in which there are multiple speech sources, particularly when the competing speech is comprehensible (Helfer, Chevalier, & Freyman, 2010;Tun, O'Kane, & Wingfield, 2002).Why do these competing speech situations become more challenging as individuals age? The ability to understand a message in the presence of competing speech involves multiple levels of both peripheral and higher level processing, from segregating the message of interest from nonessential background signals to focusing and maintaining attention on the target stream, to decoding, understanding, and encoding the information into memory. Problems at any of these levels can lead to misunderstanding.An important contributor to these listening difficulties in adverse situations is the peripheral hearing loss that typically accompanies aging. High-frequency hearing loss attenuates and distorts the incoming acoustic signal and is the primary cause of problems understanding speech in noise (Arbogast, Mason, & Kidd, 2005;Marrone, Mason, & Kidd, 2008). However, other intrinsic variables als...

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“…Some studies have reported that the masking occurs more intensely in situations with competing-speech maskers as opposed to steady-state maskers. In situations with competing-speech maskers, two types of masking occur: energetic masking (EM) and informational masking (IM) [1][2][3][4][5]. EM is a consequence of temporal and spectral overlap of the target and competing signals [2].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A New Speech-in-Noise Test for Measuring Informational Masking in Speech Perception Among Elderly Listeners

Amiri

Jarollahi

Jalaie

et al. 2020

Cureus

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Masked speech perception across the adult lifespan: Impact of age and hearing impairment

Cited by 78 publications

References 112 publications

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

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

Age-Related Changes in Objective and Subjective Speech Perception in Complex Listening Environments

A New Speech-in-Noise Test for Measuring Informational Masking in Speech Perception Among Elderly Listeners

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