Auditory-neurophysiological responses to speech during early childhood: Effects of background noise.

Auditory-neurophysiological responses to speech during early childhood: Effects of background noise. Hear Res. 2015 Jun 22; Authors: White-Schwoch T, Davies EC, Thompson EC, Carr KW, Nicol T, Bradlow AR, Kraus N Abstract Early childhood is a critical period of auditory learning, during which children are constantly mapping sounds to meaning. But learning rarely occurs under ideal listening conditions-children are forced to listen against a relentless din. This background noise degrades the neural coding of these critical sounds, in turn interfering with auditory learning. Despite the importance of robust and reliable auditory processing during early childhood, little is known about the neurophysiology underlying speech processing in children so young. To better understand the physiological constraints these adverse listening scenarios impose on speech sound coding during early childhood, auditory-neurophysiological responses were elicited to a consonant-vowel syllable in quiet and background noise in a cohort of typically-developing preschoolers (ages 3-5 yr). Overall, responses were degraded in noise: they were smaller, less stable across trials, slower, and there was poorer coding of spectral content and the temporal envelope. These effects were exacerbated in response to the consonant transition relative to the vowel, suggesting that the neural coding of spectrotemporally-dynamic speech features is more tenuous in noise than the c...
Source: Hearing Research - Category: Audiology Authors: Tags: Hear Res Source Type: research