Impaired noise adaptation contributes to speech intelligibility problems in people with hearing loss.

ABSTRACT: Understanding speech in noisy settings is harder for hearing-impaired (HI) people than for normal-hearing (NH) people, even when speech is audible. This is often attributed to hearing loss altering the neural encoding of temporal and/or spectral speech cues. Here, we investigated whether this difference may also be due to an impaired ability to adapt to background noise. For 25 adult hearing-aid users with sensorineural hearing loss, speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured for natural and tone-vocoded words embedded in speech-shaped noise (SSN). The stimuli were preceded or not by a 1-second adapting SSN precursor. Adaptation was calculated as the difference in SRT between the two precursor conditions. Corresponding data for 28 NH listeners were taken from a previously published s

SUBMITTER: Marrufo-Perez MI 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11579485 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature