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Effects of Age on Cortical Tracking of Word-Level Features of Continuous Competing Speech.

ABSTRACT: 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 four speech features: (1) word onsets, (2) "semantic" dissimilarity of each word relative to the preceding context, (3) lexical surprisal for each word, and (4) overall word audibility. Our results revealed robust tracking of all 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 word-level features 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.

SUBMITTER: Mesik J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8047075 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:When selectively attending to a speech stream in multi-talker scenarios, low-frequency cortical activity is known to synchronize selectively to fluctuations in the attended speech signal. Older listeners with age-related sensorineural hearing loss (presbycusis) often struggle to understand speech in such situations, even when wearing a hearing aid. Yet, it is unclear whether a peripheral hearing loss degrades the attentional modulation of cortical speech tracking. Here, we used psychoacoustics and electroencephalography (EEG) in male and female human listeners to examine potential effects of hearing loss on EEG correlates of speech envelope synchronization in cortex. Behaviorally, older hearing-impaired (HI) listeners showed degraded speech-in-noise recognition and reduced temporal acuity compared with age-matched normal-hearing (NH) controls. During EEG recordings, we used a selective attention task with two spatially separated simultaneous speech streams where NH and HI listeners both showed high speech recognition performance. Low-frequency (<10 Hz) envelope-entrained EEG responses were enhanced in the HI listeners, both for the attended speech, but also for tone sequences modulated at slow rates (4 Hz) during passive listening. Compared with the attended speech, responses to the ignored stream were found to be reduced in both HI and NH listeners, allowing for the attended target to be classified from single-trial EEG data with similar high accuracy in the two groups. However, despite robust attention-modulated speech entrainment, the HI listeners rated the competing speech task to be more difficult. These results suggest that speech-in-noise problems experienced by older HI listeners are not necessarily associated with degraded attentional selection.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT People with age-related sensorineural hearing loss often struggle to follow speech in the presence of competing talkers. It is currently unclear whether hearing impairment may impair the ability to use selective attention to suppress distracting speech in situations when the distractor is well segregated from the target. Here, we report amplified envelope-entrained cortical EEG responses to attended speech and to simple tones modulated at speech rates (4 Hz) in listeners with age-related hearing loss. Critically, despite increased self-reported listening difficulties, cortical synchronization to speech mixtures was robustly modulated by selective attention in listeners with hearing loss. This allowed the attended talker to be classified from single-trial EEG responses with high accuracy in both older hearing-impaired listeners and age-matched normal-hearing controls.

Project description:Impaired speech perception in noise despite normal peripheral auditory function is a common problem in young adults. Despite a growing body of research, the pathophysiology of this impairment remains unknown. This magnetoencephalography study characterizes the cortical tracking of speech in a multi-talker background in a group of highly selected adult subjects with impaired speech perception in noise without peripheral auditory dysfunction. Magnetoencephalographic signals were recorded from 13 subjects with impaired speech perception in noise (six females, mean age: 30 years) and matched healthy subjects while they were listening to 5 different recordings of stories merged with a multi-talker background at different signal to noise ratios (No Noise, +10, +5, 0 and -5 dB). The cortical tracking of speech was quantified with coherence between magnetoencephalographic signals and the temporal envelope of (i) the global auditory scene (i.e. the attended speech stream and the multi-talker background noise), (ii) the attended speech stream only and (iii) the multi-talker background noise. Functional connectivity was then estimated between brain areas showing altered cortical tracking of speech in noise in subjects with impaired speech perception in noise and the rest of the brain. All participants demonstrated a selective cortical representation of the attended speech stream in noisy conditions, but subjects with impaired speech perception in noise displayed reduced cortical tracking of speech at the syllable rate (i.e. 4-8 Hz) in all noisy conditions. Increased functional connectivity was observed in subjects with impaired speech perception in noise in Noiseless and speech in noise conditions between supratemporal auditory cortices and left-dominant brain areas involved in semantic and attention processes. The difficulty to understand speech in a multi-talker background in subjects with impaired speech perception in noise appears to be related to an inaccurate auditory cortex tracking of speech at the syllable rate. The increased functional connectivity between supratemporal auditory cortices and language/attention-related neocortical areas probably aims at supporting speech perception and subsequent recognition in adverse auditory scenes. Overall, this study argues for a central origin of impaired speech perception in noise in the absence of any peripheral auditory dysfunction.

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Effects of Age on Cortical Tracking of Word-Level Features of Continuous Competing Speech.

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