Cortical encoding of phonetic onsets of both attended and ignored speech in hearing impaired individuals.

ABSTRACT: Hearing impairment alters the sound input received by the human auditory system, reducing speech comprehension in noisy multi-talker auditory scenes. Despite such difficulties, neural signals were shown to encode the attended speech envelope more reliably than the envelope of ignored sounds, reflecting the intention of listeners with hearing impairment (HI). This result raises an important question: What speech-processing stage could reflect the difficulty in attentional selection, if not envelope tracking? Here, we use scalp electroencephalography (EEG) to test the hypothesis that the neural encoding of phonological information (i.e., phonetic boundaries and phonological categories) is affected by HI. In a cocktail-party scenario, such phonological difficulty might be reflected in an over

SUBMITTER: Carta S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11584098 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature