Aug 2026· Audiology Research· Vol 16, pp. 122· 0 citations· 99 references
TL;DR
Elderly listeners with normal hearing to moderate hearing loss could maintain relatively high intelligibility for mosaic words segmented in blocks of 20 or 40 ms, provided the words had a high familiarity level.
Abstract
Background/Objectives: Mosaic speech was used to further investigate the auditory system’s temporal resolution needed for speech intelligibility. Mosaic speech is a form of degraded speech segmented in frequency × time blocks with no discernible temporal fine structure and with degraded amplitude envelope cues. Methods: We performed a listening experiment with mosaic speech consisting of 20 frequency bands segmented into 20, 40, 80, 160, and 320 ms. Younger listeners (<25 years; n = 20), with self-reported normal hearing and having passed a limited screening test, and elderly listeners (>65 years; n = 19) with hearing thresholds ranging from normal hearing to moderate hearing loss listened to Japanese low- and high-familiarity mosaic words and wrote down what they heard. The original words were included as control stimuli. Results: Although younger listeners had significantly higher intelligibility scores, elderly listeners could integrate and parse coarse blocks of mosaic speech of 20 ms and 40 ms with intelligibility scores of 84% or higher for high-familiarity words. For longer block durations, however, the elderly listeners’ intelligibility dropped rapidly for both high- and low-familiarity words. In both the young and the elderly listener groups, intelligibility reached the floor for block durations of 160 and 320 ms. Word familiarity strongly affected intelligibility scores. For blocks up to 80 ms, intelligibility was significantly higher for high-familiarity words than for low-familiarity words in both age groups, with a 10–30% difference. Conclusions: Elderly listeners (n = 19) with normal hearing to moderate hearing loss could maintain relatively high intelligibility for mosaic words segmented in blocks of 20 or 40 ms, provided the words had a high familiarity level.
Many older adults report social isolation. This may derive from hearing and cognitive declines, but the contribution of language processing is unclear. A critical language skill is the ability to cope with challenging listening conditions like noise, quiet speech, or time-compressed speech. We report results from an ongoing study of over 200 typically hearing adults aged 30–90. To test the ability to perceive time-compressed speech, participants heard sentences compressed to 30% of their duration and repeated them aloud. This was part of a larger battery testing cognition, language, speech perception, and patient-reported outcomes. We first asked if time-compressed speech perception declines with age. Age alone accounted for 60.2% of the variance in time-compressed speech (N = 173, p < 0.0001). For participants with hearing (PTA) and cognitive scores (N = 124), these factors accounted for 46% of the variance, and only hearing was significant (p < 0.0001). However, age predicted an additional 16.1% of the variance (p < 0.0001). Thus, age-related declines in time-compressed speech perception are not wholly the result of hearing and cognitive decline. Time-compressedspeech performance was also correlated with speech reception threshold (r = 0.570) and speech in noise (0.504), even after accounting for age and hearing (p = 0.0089, N = 117). This suggests a core ability to recognize challenging speech.
M. Revis, Sarah E. Colby, Samarium Knight et al.· Journal of the Acoustical So...· 0 citations
Adaptation, or rapid performance gains with repeated exposure, is one of the processes that supports the recognition of speech in challenging listening conditions. Age-related hearing loss is associated with substantial declines in speech recognition in challenging conditions. It is not clear whether age-related hearing loss relates to adaptation and whether adaptation is influenced by a hearing-aid. To this end, we characterized adaptation to time-compressed speech and speech in babble noise in a group of 57 participants (ages 60–90) that were tested both with and without hearing aids fitted by an audiologist just before the assessment. Significant adaptation occurred in both speech conditions. Speech in noise recognition accuracy improved by approximately 15% over the course of listening to 16 sentences with hearing aids but remained stable without the hearing aids (OR = 1.24). The rate of adaptation did not depend on hearing. Adaptation to time-compressed speech also occurred only with the hearing aids (improvement of ∼10%, OR = 1.32). Adaptation was stronger in listeners with poorer hearing (OR = 1.18), perhaps due to their poor starting accuracy. Together, these data suggest that amplification can contribute to speech adaptation even in inexperienced hearing aid users.
K. Banai, L. Lavie· Journal of the Acoustical So...· 0 citations
Cochlear implants (CIs) for single-sided deafness (SSD) can partially restore the ability to use binaural interactions to improve masked speech intelligibility. When target and masking speech are presented to the acoustic-hearing (AH) ear, presenting a copy of the masker to the CI ear facilitates spatial release from masking (SRM) and improves speech perception. The reverse is not true, however; presenting a copy of the masker to the AH ear can impede CI-ear speech perception. This “bilateral speech interference” varies greatly across listeners and understanding the source of this variability is crucial to maximizing SRM. Bilateral speech interference was assessed in 19 SSD-CI listeners (ages 20–77 years) using the coordinate response measure corpus. Participants also completed two non-auditory selective-attention tasks (Stroop, Flanker) and a working memory task (Reading Span). Bilateral speech interference was significantly associated with older age and poorer selective attention, while better working memory was significantly associated with improved performance overall. The role of domain-general selective attention points to possible clinical applications including selective-attention training or pre-operative screening for risk of interference. [The views expressed in this abstract are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the Department of War or U.S. Government.]
Michael A. Johns, Sandeep A. Phatak, M. Goupell et al.· Journal of the Acoustical So...· 0 citations
Listeners with hearing loss report difficulty understanding speech in the presence of background talkers (the “cocktail party problem”) even while wearing hearing aids. In this listening situation, a listener must be able to focus on the target talker using cues related to the talker’s voice and spatial location. Hearing aids provide necessary amplification for listeners with hearing loss, but they can also disrupt sound localization, which may counteract the positive effects and impact speech recognition in spatialized speech mixtures. To investigate this possibility, we conducted a study in which normally hearing listeners performed two tasks with and without hearing aids. In one task, listeners localized individual words presented from loudspeakers. In another task, a five-talker mixture was presented and listeners identified words spoken by a target talker at a specified location. We observed striking individual variations in the degree of disruption in localization accuracy with hearing aids, which were associated with reductions in word identification accuracy. The results highlight that there are listener-specific effects of hearing aids on spatial perception that may impact speech understanding in cocktail party environments, although additional work is needed to evaluate these effects in listeners with hearing loss. [Work supported by NIH NIDCD R01DC015760.]
Elin Roverud, Virginia Best· Journal of the Acoustical So...· 0 citations
Difficulties understanding speech in noise remain a common complaint even among listeners with normal hearing sensitivity, highlighting the need for objective, more effective measures of real-world listening. The goal of this study was to validate the use of a novel, chirped-speech (Cheech) stimulus—continuous, naturally-spoken speech fused with chirps designed to elicit robust auditory evoked potentials—to characterize relationships between speech recognition, listening effort, and auditory neural encoding. Twenty-five normal-hearing adults completed a sentence-recognition task using both original (unmodified) and Cheech-modified AzBio sentence lists in quiet, +3 dB, and −3 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions while neural responses from the brainstem through cortex were recorded simultaneously. Speech recognition remained near ceiling in quiet but declined with decreasing SNR for both original and Cheech stimuli. Compared with clean speech, Cheech-modified speech showed slightly poorer recognition performance as SNR decreased and somewhat higher perceived effort overall. Yet, Cheech was highly effective at evoking auditory responses from the brainstem (auditory brainstem response, ABR) through the cortex (including middle- and late-latency responses, MLR and LLR) even with <5 minutes listening time per condition. Neural responses showed reduced amplitudes and prolonged latencies as SNR decreased. In general, ABR latencies and wave I amplitudes were associated with speech-in-noise recognition performance, whereas cortical responses (MLR Na, Nb, and LLR P1) were associated with subjective workload. These findings show that Cheech-modified speech preserves intelligibility while yielding robust, multilevel neural recordings during sentence perception, offering a promising approach to examine hierarchical auditory processing under ecologically relevant speech-in-noise conditions.
May Chao, C. Holloway, Lee M. Miller et al.· bioRxiv· 0 citations
Accurate speech understanding is crucial in everyday life. Yet, speech is often degraded by a variety of talker and environmental factors, which listeners must overcome. In this online experiment, we assess how degraded speech intelligibility is supported by "elemental" cognitive processes. Eighty-nine healthy adults listened to spoken sentences degraded in five ways and reported the words that they heard. In addition, they completed the Reading Span and N-back tasks to assess working memory capacity (WM), as well as a short version of Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices to assess fluid reasoning ability. In bivariate correlational analyses, all cognitive test scores predicted degraded speech intelligibility. However, multivariate and dominance analyses revealed that the test of fluid reasoning was the most important predictor of intelligibility. These results may undermine the assumption that WM, as measured by the Reading Span and other tasks, is the primary cognitive construct supporting degraded speech intelligibility.
J. Rovetti, Ingrid S. Johnsrude, Stephen C. Van Hedger· Cognition· 0 citations
We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads.
See our Cookie Policy.
