Speech-in-noise perception in musicians: A review

Coffey, Emily B. J.; Mogilever, Nicolette B.; Zatorre, Robert J.

doi:10.1016/j.heares.2017.02.006

Cited by 131 publications

(122 citation statements)

References 114 publications

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“…This accords with the latency of the frequency-following response to a pure tone as well as with previously reported latencies of the brainstem response to short speech tokens, and evidences a subcortical origin 50,64 . Although recent MEG and EEG investigations have found that the frequency-following response (FFR) as well as neural responses to the temporal fine structure of speech can also have cortical contributions, we have not observed an additional peak in the brainstem response at a longer latency 65,66 . Such a cortical contribution may nonetheless be present but not measurable in our experiments due to a dominant contribution from the brainstem and due to the relatively broad autocorrelation of the fundamental waveform that limits the temporal resolution and thereby the identification of different components of the neural response 30 .…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 91%

Individual differences in the attentional modulation of the human auditory brainstem response to speech inform on speech-in-noise deficits

Saiz-Alía

Forte

Reichenbach

2019

Sci Rep

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People with normal hearing thresholds can nonetheless have difficulty with understanding speech in noisy backgrounds. The origins of such supra-threshold hearing deficits remain largely unclear. Previously we showed that the auditory brainstem response to running speech is modulated by selective attention, evidencing a subcortical mechanism that contributes to speech-in-noise comprehension. We observed, however, significant variation in the magnitude of the brainstem's attentional modulation between the different volunteers. Here we show that this variability relates to the ability of the subjects to understand speech in background noise. In particular, we assessed 43 young human volunteers with normal hearing thresholds for their speech-in-noise comprehension. We also recorded their auditory brainstem responses to running speech when selectively attending to one of two competing voices. To control for potential peripheral hearing deficits, and in particular for cochlear synaptopathy, we further assessed noise exposure, the temporal sensitivity threshold, the middle-ear muscle reflex, and the auditory-brainstem response to clicks in various levels of background noise. These tests did not show evidence for cochlear synaptopathy amongst the volunteers. Furthermore, we found that only the attentional modulation of the brainstem response to speech was significantly related to speech-in-noise comprehension. Our results therefore evidence an impact of topdown modulation of brainstem activity on the variability in speech-in-noise comprehension amongst the subjects.Understanding speech in noisy backgrounds such as other competing speakers is a challenging task at which humans excel 1,2 It requires the separation of different sound sources, selective attention to the target speaker, and the processing of degraded signals 3-5 Hearing impairment such as resulting from noise exposure often leads to an increase of hearing thresholds, a reduction in the information conveyed about a sound to the central auditory system, and thus to greater difficulty in understanding speech in noise 6-8 However, even listeners with normal hearing thresholds can have problems with understanding speech in noisy environments 9,10 .An extensive neural network of efferent fibers can feed information from the central auditory cortex back to the auditory brainstem and even to the cochlea 11,12 . Research on the role of these neural feedback loops for speech-in-noise listening has mostly focused on the medial olivocochlear reflex (MOCR), in which stimulation of the medial olivocochlear fibers that synapse on the outer hair cells in the cochlea reduces cochlear amplification across a wide frequency band 13 . Computational modelling as well as animal studies have shown that such reduced broad-band amplification can improve the signal-to-noise ratio of a transient signal embedded in background noise [14][15][16][17] . However, it remains debated whether the reduction of cochlear amplification through the MOCR contributes to better speech-in-noise comprehe...

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 91%

Individual differences in the attentional modulation of the human auditory brainstem response to speech inform on speech-in-noise deficits

Saiz-Alía

Forte

Reichenbach

2019

Sci Rep

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“…A second goal of this study was to investigate transfer of musical training to the perception of speech in complex environments. There have been many reports of a musician advantage for speech perception in speech maskers (Baskent and Gaudrain, 2016;Clayton et al, 2016;Deroche et al, 2017;Du and Zatorre, 2017;Meha-Bettison et al, 2017;Morse-Fortier et al, 2017;Parbery-Clark et al, 2009;Slater and Kraus, 2016;Swaminathan et al, 2015;Yeend et al, 2017;Zendel and Alain, 2012; for a review see Coffey et al, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech-in-speech perception, nonverbal selective attention, and musical training.

Tierney¹,

Rosen

Dick³

2020

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Speech is more difficult to understand when it is presented concurrently with a distractor speech stream. One source of this difficulty is that competing speech can act as an attentional lure, requiring listeners to exert attentional control to ensure that attention does not drift away from the target. Stronger attentional control may enable listeners to more successfully ignore distracting speech, and so individual differences in selective attention may be one factor driving the ability to perceive speech in complex environments. However, the lack of a paradigm for measuring non-verbal sustained selective attention to sound has made this hypothesis difficult to test. Here we find that individuals who are better able to attend to a stream of tones and respond to occasional repeated sequences while ignoring a distractor tone stream are also better able to perceive speech masked by a single distractor talker. We also find that participants who have undergone more musical training show better performance on both verbal and non-verbal selective attention tasks, and this musician advantage is greater in older participants. This suggests that one source of a potential musician advantage for speech perception in complex environments may be experience or skill in directing and maintaining attention to a single auditory object.

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“…Generalized perceptual improvements need not be limited to the visual modality. A history of musical training has been associated with a wide-range of enhanced auditory perceptual abilities, ranging from low-level feature discrimination to speech processing in noise [24–27], although, like action video games, the mechanisms driving these improvements are not fully understood [20,28,29]. Here we ask whether some of the challenges inherent to playing musical instruments or action video games could be packaged into a computerized audiomotor training interface to promote the generalized gains in speech processing that have proven elusive in prior auditory training studies [17].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Audiomotor Perceptual Training Enhances Speech Intelligibility in Background Noise

et al. 2017

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Summary Sensory and motor skills can be improved with training, but learning is often restricted to practice stimuli. As an exception, training on closed-loop (CL) sensorimotor interfaces, such as action video games and musical instruments, can impart a broad spectrum of perceptual benefits. Here we ask whether computerized CL auditory training can enhance speech understanding in levels of background noise that approximate a crowded restaurant. Elderly hearing impaired subjects trained for eight weeks on a CL game that, like a musical instrument, challenged them to monitor subtle deviations between predicted and actual auditory feedback as they moved their fingertip through a virtual soundscape. We performed our study as a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial by training other subjects in an auditory working memory (WM) task. Subjects in both groups improved at their respective auditory tasks and reported comparable expectations for improved speech processing, thereby controlling for placebo effects. Whereas speech intelligibility was unchanged after WM training, subjects in the CL training group could correctly identify 25% more words in spoken sentences or digit sequences presented in high levels of background noise. Numerically, CL audiomotor training provided more than three times the benefit of our subjects’ hearing aids for speech processing in noisy listening conditions. Gains in speech intelligibility could be predicted from gameplay accuracy and baseline inhibitory control. However, benefits did not persist in the absence of continuing practice. These studies employ stringent clinical standards to demonstrate that perceptual learning on a computerized audiogame can transfer to “real world” communication challenges.

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Speech-in-noise perception in musicians: A review

Cited by 131 publications

References 114 publications

Individual differences in the attentional modulation of the human auditory brainstem response to speech inform on speech-in-noise deficits

Individual differences in the attentional modulation of the human auditory brainstem response to speech inform on speech-in-noise deficits

Speech-in-speech perception, nonverbal selective attention, and musical training.

Audiomotor Perceptual Training Enhances Speech Intelligibility in Background Noise

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