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‘Normal’ hearing thresholds and fundamental auditory grouping processes predict difficulties with speech-in-noise perception

Understanding speech when background noise is present is a critical everyday task that varies widely among people. A key challenge is to understand why some people struggle with speech-in-noise perception, despite having clinically normal hearing. Here, we developed new figure-ground tests that requ...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Holmes, Emma, Griffiths, Timothy D.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6856372/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31728002
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-53353-5
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author Holmes, Emma
Griffiths, Timothy D.
author_facet Holmes, Emma
Griffiths, Timothy D.
author_sort Holmes, Emma
collection PubMed
description Understanding speech when background noise is present is a critical everyday task that varies widely among people. A key challenge is to understand why some people struggle with speech-in-noise perception, despite having clinically normal hearing. Here, we developed new figure-ground tests that require participants to extract a coherent tone pattern from a stochastic background of tones. These tests dissociated variability in speech-in-noise perception related to mechanisms for detecting static (same-frequency) patterns and those for tracking patterns that change frequency over time. In addition, elevated hearing thresholds that are widely considered to be ‘normal’ explained significant variance in speech-in-noise perception, independent of figure-ground perception. Overall, our results demonstrate that successful speech-in-noise perception is related to audiometric thresholds, fundamental grouping of static acoustic patterns, and tracking of acoustic sources that change in frequency. Crucially, speech-in-noise deficits are better assessed by measuring central (grouping) processes alongside audiometric thresholds.
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spelling pubmed-68563722019-12-17 ‘Normal’ hearing thresholds and fundamental auditory grouping processes predict difficulties with speech-in-noise perception Holmes, Emma Griffiths, Timothy D. Sci Rep Article Understanding speech when background noise is present is a critical everyday task that varies widely among people. A key challenge is to understand why some people struggle with speech-in-noise perception, despite having clinically normal hearing. Here, we developed new figure-ground tests that require participants to extract a coherent tone pattern from a stochastic background of tones. These tests dissociated variability in speech-in-noise perception related to mechanisms for detecting static (same-frequency) patterns and those for tracking patterns that change frequency over time. In addition, elevated hearing thresholds that are widely considered to be ‘normal’ explained significant variance in speech-in-noise perception, independent of figure-ground perception. Overall, our results demonstrate that successful speech-in-noise perception is related to audiometric thresholds, fundamental grouping of static acoustic patterns, and tracking of acoustic sources that change in frequency. Crucially, speech-in-noise deficits are better assessed by measuring central (grouping) processes alongside audiometric thresholds. Nature Publishing Group UK 2019-11-14 /pmc/articles/PMC6856372/ /pubmed/31728002 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-53353-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Holmes, Emma
Griffiths, Timothy D.
‘Normal’ hearing thresholds and fundamental auditory grouping processes predict difficulties with speech-in-noise perception
title ‘Normal’ hearing thresholds and fundamental auditory grouping processes predict difficulties with speech-in-noise perception
title_full ‘Normal’ hearing thresholds and fundamental auditory grouping processes predict difficulties with speech-in-noise perception
title_fullStr ‘Normal’ hearing thresholds and fundamental auditory grouping processes predict difficulties with speech-in-noise perception
title_full_unstemmed ‘Normal’ hearing thresholds and fundamental auditory grouping processes predict difficulties with speech-in-noise perception
title_short ‘Normal’ hearing thresholds and fundamental auditory grouping processes predict difficulties with speech-in-noise perception
title_sort ‘normal’ hearing thresholds and fundamental auditory grouping processes predict difficulties with speech-in-noise perception
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6856372/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31728002
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-53353-5
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