TY - JOUR
T1 - Brainstem correlates of speech-in-noise perception in children
AU - Anderson, Samira
AU - Skoe, Erika
AU - Chandrasekaran, Bharath
AU - Zecker, Steven G
AU - Kraus, Nina
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was funded by the National Institutes of Health (RO1 DC01510 ) and the Hugh Knowles Center of Northwestern University . We would like to thank Trent Nicol, Judy Song, Jane Hornickel, Alexandra Parbery-Clark, Jennifer Krizman, and Kyung Myun Lee for their helpful comments and suggestions regarding an earlier version of the manuscript. We would especially like to thank the children and their families who participated in the study.
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - Children often have difficulty understanding speech in challenging listening environments. In the absence of peripheral hearing loss, these speech perception difficulties may arise from dysfunction at more central levels in the auditory system, including subcortical structures. We examined brainstem encoding of pitch in a speech syllable in 38 school-age children. In children with poor speech-in-noise perception, we find impaired encoding of the fundamental frequency and the second harmonic, two important cues for pitch perception. Pitch, an essential factor in speaker identification, aids the listener in tracking a specific voice from a background of voices. These results suggest that the robustness of subcortical neural encoding of pitch features in time-varying signals is a key factor in determining success with perceiving speech in noise.
AB - Children often have difficulty understanding speech in challenging listening environments. In the absence of peripheral hearing loss, these speech perception difficulties may arise from dysfunction at more central levels in the auditory system, including subcortical structures. We examined brainstem encoding of pitch in a speech syllable in 38 school-age children. In children with poor speech-in-noise perception, we find impaired encoding of the fundamental frequency and the second harmonic, two important cues for pitch perception. Pitch, an essential factor in speaker identification, aids the listener in tracking a specific voice from a background of voices. These results suggest that the robustness of subcortical neural encoding of pitch features in time-varying signals is a key factor in determining success with perceiving speech in noise.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=78649837973&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=78649837973&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.heares.2010.08.001
DO - 10.1016/j.heares.2010.08.001
M3 - Article
C2 - 20708671
AN - SCOPUS:78649837973
SN - 0378-5955
VL - 270
SP - 151
EP - 157
JO - Hearing research
JF - Hearing research
IS - 1-2
ER -
