Speech Science Forum: Dr Anna Exenberger

Tracking the acoustics of speech through noise and hearing impairment

This talk discusses three studies conducted to investigate neural speech processing in adverse conditions and hearing impairment. The main focus is on neural entrainment of speech as a measure of cortical processing. Study 1 investigated the effect of different degradation forms (noise and vocoding) on neural entrainment. Study 2 focused on how hearing impairment and age affect cortical tracking activity. Study 3, following up on results from Study 2, investigated the effects of a specific degradation form as well as motivation. Findings from these studies suggest that cortical entrainment is affected in distinct ways by various degradation forms and degrees, and that hearing impairment can lead to an increase in entrainment despite lower speech intelligibility.