Seminars in Hearing Research at Purdue (SHRP)

Title: Effects of sensorineural hearing loss on robust speech coding

Speaker: Michael G. Heinz, Professor of SLHS/BME

Date: March 11, 2021

Time: 10:30 – 11:20 am

Zoom Info:

https://purdue-edu.zoom.us/j/92984271347?pwd=WUJ4TzU3MWU3a1dkNnZWS1BoNHdrUT09

Meeting ID: 929 8427 1347

Passcode: 836748

Abstract:

Listeners with sensorineural hearing loss often struggle to understand speech even when audibility has been restored.  This is especially true in noisy situations and is thought to result from suprathreshold deficits such as degraded frequency selectivity and temporal precision. This talk will review some of the progress our lab has made exploring the effects of sensorineural hearing loss on the neural coding of sounds in noise as part of our NIH-funded R01 grant.  This includes results showing that in fact the temporal precision of speech coding is not diminished, but rather the strength of envelope coding can be enhanced in ways that may be detrimental for listening in noise (with inherent fluctuations itself).  Also, while broadened tuning certainly does degrade speech coding in noise, the primary effects of noise-induced hearing loss on speech coding (vowels and consonants) appear to come from distorted tonotopic coding associated with degraded tip-to-tail ratios in auditory-nerve tuning.  Because the degree of distorted tonotopy appears to vary with etiology (e.g., noise-induced hearing loss vs. age-related hearing loss), it is possible that this understudied mechanism may be a significant factor contributing to individual differences in speech perception across listeners, even those with similar audiograms. Finally, this talk with present ideas for future work motivated by these results.

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The working schedule is available here:

https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_schedule

The titles and abstracts of the talks will be added here:

https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_abstracts