Severe difficulty understanding speech-in-noise causes social withdrawal, inhibits academic achievement, and limits vocational opportunities for those affected. Inexplicably, there are individuals who experience severe difficulty understanding speech-in-noise despite having normal hearing sensitivity, such as normally aging adults and children with reading, language, auditory processing, and learning disorders. The neurobiological basis of speech-in-noise deficits in these individuals is currently unknown, which limits evaluation and targeted treatment of this hearing disability. The efferent auditory system is the division of the auditory nervous system that is believed to fine-tune and filter auditory information as it ascends from the inner ears to the brain. This system has been studied extensively in animals, but far less is known about how it works in humans during speech-in-noise processing. Some evidence suggests that selective dysfunction in the efferent auditory system may cause severe difficulty hearing in noise while leaving hearing sensitivity intact. The proposed research investigates the function of one specific mechanism of the human efferent auditory system, the medial olivocochlear (MOC) bundle, in the neural encoding and perception of speech-in-noise in normal hearing adults and children. The MOC bundle is an efferent neural circuit, which has been shown to filter and suppresses background noise at the level of the inner ear in animals. This filter may allow less noise to be transcribed into neural code, which in turn improves perception of auditory signals in competing background noise. It remains unclear if the human MOC reflex is: a) an important efferent mechanism that reduces the effect of noise on the bottom-up neural encoding of speech, and b) modulated by top-down processes, such as active listening, to enhance hearing in noise. These issues will be addressed in two studies. The first study will involve measurements of speech-evoked neural activity from the auditory nerve and brainstem during MOC reflex activation to determine if this reflex improves the neural encoding of speech-in-noise. It is hypothesized that activation of the MOC reflex will improve the neural encoding of speech-in-noise at the level of the auditory nerve and brainstem. In the second study, participants will actively listen to an Auditory Stroop Task while the MOC reflex is engaged to determine if cognitive demands modulate the MOC reflex. It is hypothesized that more challenging listening conditions of the Auditory Stroop Task will have a greater impact on MOC reflex strength, indicating a modulatory relationship between the brain and inner ears. The outcomes of this research clarify the role of the efferent system in speech-in-noise processing and can be used to create targeted treatments and objective assessments for individuals with severe difficulties understanding speech-in-noise.
The goal of this research is to better understand the role of the efferent auditory system in the neural encoding of speech-in-noise in normally hearing adults and children using a hypothesis-driven approach. The outcomes of this research can then be used to a) create targeted treatments and objective assessments for individuals with severe difficulties understanding speech-in-noise, such as aging adults and children with auditory processing, reading, or learning disorders and b) create better noise reduction algorithms for hearing aids and cochlear implants that are based on neural processing strategies in the normal auditory system.
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| Smith, Spencer B; Cone, Barbara (2015) The medial olivocochlear reflex in children during active listening. Int J Audiol 54:518-23 |
