The effects of age and cochlear hearing loss on temporal fine structure sensitivity, frequency selectivity, and speech reception in noise

Abstract

Temporal fine structure (TFS) sensitivity, frequency selectivity, and speech reception in noise were measured for young normal-hearing (NHY), old normal-hearing (NHO), and hearing-impaired (HI) subjects. Two measures of TFS sensitivity were used: the "TFS-LF test" (interaural phase difference discrimination) and the "TFS2 test" (discrimination of harmonic and frequency-shifted tones). These measures were not significantly correlated with frequency selectivity (after partialing out the effect of audiometric threshold), suggesting that insensitivity to TFS cannot be wholly explained by a broadening of auditory filters. The results of the two tests of TFS sensitivity were significantly but modestly correlated, suggesting that performance of the tests may be partly influenced by different factors. The NHO group performed significantly more poorly than the NHY group for both measures of TFS sensitivity, but not frequency selectivity, suggesting that TFS sensitivity declines with age in the absence of elevated audiometric thresholds or broadened auditory filters. When the effect of mean audiometric threshold was partialed out, speech reception thresholds in modulated noise were correlated with TFS2 scores, but not measures of frequency selectivity or TFS-LF test scores, suggesting that a reduction in sensitivity to TFS can partly account for the speech perception difficulties experienced by hearing-impaired subjects.

Contributions of Coding Efficiency of Temporal-Structure and Level Information to Lateralization Performance in Young and Early-Elderly Listeners

“…This confirms earlier findings that the sensitivity to temporal structure declines without accompanying elevated audiometric thresholds (e.g., Hopkins and Moore 2011). Thresholds for the LEVEL task also tended to be higher in the elderly than the young, consistently with previous finding (e.g., He et al 1998).…”

“…We then analysed correlations, as in the earlier study, between task performances. It has been reported that sensitivities to the temporal structure and intensity of stimuli decline with age (e.g., Hopkins and Moore 2011). A population including young and elderly listeners would therefore exhibit a large variability of thresholds in the monaural tasks, which would lead to improved sensitivity of the correlation analyses and provide further insights as to the roles of monaural processing in ITD or ILD discrimination.…”

Relating binaural pitch perception to the individual listener’s auditory profile

“…However, the extent to which damage in each of these entities contributes to impaired TFS processing remains difficult to quantify. Although the absence of correlation between TFS-processing measures and frequency selectivity is in agreement with the findings of, e.g., Strelcyk and Dau (2009) and Hopkins and Moore (2011), a cautionary note should be made concerning the small number of subjects used here and in previous studies. Small sample sizes impose strong limits to statistical power, and hence to the conclusions that can be drawn from not finding high correlations.…”

Relation Between Cochlear Mechanics and Performance of Temporal Fine Structure-Based Tasks

“…This correlation, together with other earlier findings on the relationship between the performance of monaural and binaural TFS tasks (Hopkins and Moore 2011;Moore et al 2012), can be interpreted as indicating that binaural TFS processing is partly determined by the efficiency of monaural TFS processing. The present study also found a significant correlation between high-rate FMDLs and high-rate AMDLs.…”