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Hearing-Aid Directionality Improves Neural Speech Tracking in Older Hearing-Impaired Listeners

In recent years, a growing body of literature has explored the effect of hearing impairment on the neural processing of speech, particularly related to the neural tracking of speech envelopes. However, only limited work has focused on the potential usage of the method for evaluating the effect of he...

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Autor principal: Petersen, Eline Borch
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9228639/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35730193
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/23312165221099894
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author Petersen, Eline Borch
author_facet Petersen, Eline Borch
author_sort Petersen, Eline Borch
collection PubMed
description In recent years, a growing body of literature has explored the effect of hearing impairment on the neural processing of speech, particularly related to the neural tracking of speech envelopes. However, only limited work has focused on the potential usage of the method for evaluating the effect of hearing aids designed to amplify and process the auditory input provided to hearing-impaired listeners. The current study investigates how directional sound processing in hearing-aids, denoted directionality, affects the neural tracking and encoding of speech in EEG recorded from 11 older hearing-impaired listeners. Behaviorally, the task performance improved when directionality was applied, while subjective ratings of listening effort were not affected. The reconstruction of the to-be-attended speech envelopes improved significantly when applying directionality, as well as when removing the background noise altogether. When inspecting the modelled response of the neural encoding of speech, a faster transition was observed between the early bottom-up response and the later top-down attentional-driven responses when directionality was applied. In summary, hearing-aid directionality affects both the neural speech tracking and neural encoding of to-be-attended speech. This result shows that hearing-aid signal processing impacts the neural processing of sounds and that neural speech tracking is indicative of the benefits associated with applying hearing-aid processing algorithms.
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spelling pubmed-92286392022-06-25 Hearing-Aid Directionality Improves Neural Speech Tracking in Older Hearing-Impaired Listeners Petersen, Eline Borch Trends Hear Original Article In recent years, a growing body of literature has explored the effect of hearing impairment on the neural processing of speech, particularly related to the neural tracking of speech envelopes. However, only limited work has focused on the potential usage of the method for evaluating the effect of hearing aids designed to amplify and process the auditory input provided to hearing-impaired listeners. The current study investigates how directional sound processing in hearing-aids, denoted directionality, affects the neural tracking and encoding of speech in EEG recorded from 11 older hearing-impaired listeners. Behaviorally, the task performance improved when directionality was applied, while subjective ratings of listening effort were not affected. The reconstruction of the to-be-attended speech envelopes improved significantly when applying directionality, as well as when removing the background noise altogether. When inspecting the modelled response of the neural encoding of speech, a faster transition was observed between the early bottom-up response and the later top-down attentional-driven responses when directionality was applied. In summary, hearing-aid directionality affects both the neural speech tracking and neural encoding of to-be-attended speech. This result shows that hearing-aid signal processing impacts the neural processing of sounds and that neural speech tracking is indicative of the benefits associated with applying hearing-aid processing algorithms. SAGE Publications 2022-06-22 /pmc/articles/PMC9228639/ /pubmed/35730193 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/23312165221099894 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Original Article
Petersen, Eline Borch
Hearing-Aid Directionality Improves Neural Speech Tracking in Older Hearing-Impaired Listeners
title Hearing-Aid Directionality Improves Neural Speech Tracking in Older Hearing-Impaired Listeners
title_full Hearing-Aid Directionality Improves Neural Speech Tracking in Older Hearing-Impaired Listeners
title_fullStr Hearing-Aid Directionality Improves Neural Speech Tracking in Older Hearing-Impaired Listeners
title_full_unstemmed Hearing-Aid Directionality Improves Neural Speech Tracking in Older Hearing-Impaired Listeners
title_short Hearing-Aid Directionality Improves Neural Speech Tracking in Older Hearing-Impaired Listeners
title_sort hearing-aid directionality improves neural speech tracking in older hearing-impaired listeners
topic Original Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9228639/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35730193
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/23312165221099894
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