Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Ronan McGarrigle, Sarah Knight, Benjamin W. Y. Hornsby, Sven Mattys
Summary: This study found opposing effects of age on listening-related fatigue: as individuals age, reductions in mood disturbance and sensory-processing sensitivity can lead to decreased listening-related fatigue, but older adults with greater perceived hearing impairment tend to report increased fatigue. Additionally, the effect of auditory attention ability on listening-related fatigue is moderated by sensory-processing sensitivity, with individuals with high sensitivity experiencing increased fatigue despite better attention ability. These findings provide insights into the complex factors influencing age-related changes in listening-related fatigue.
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
(2021)
Article
Neurosciences
Lars Hausfeld, Martha Shiell, Elia Formisano, Lars Riecke
Summary: Selective attention is crucial for processing auditory scenes with multiple speakers, as it involves separating relevant speech from irrelevant speech. This study found that increasing perceptual demand may reduce cortical processing of distractor speech and decrease their perceptual segregation.
Article
Neurosciences
Farhin Ahmed, Aaron R. Nidiffer, Aisling E. O'Sullivan, Nathaniel J. Zuk, Edmund C. Lalor
Summary: Seeing the speaker's face improves speech understanding in noisy environments due to the brain's ability to integrate audio and visual information. Selective attention plays a crucial role in our understanding, but how attention and multisensory integration interact during natural speech remains unclear. Using EEG data, we found evidence for multisensory integration of attended audiovisual speech and suppression of integration for unattended speech. Early integration occurred for unattended speech, but not at later processing levels. These findings suggest that natural audio and visual speech integration happens at multiple processing levels and is influenced by attention.
Article
Education, Special
Rony Lemel, Lilach Shalev, Gal Nitsan, Boaz M. Ben-David
Summary: This study examined how attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affects speech processing in adverse listening conditions. The results showed that ADHD impairs speech processing accuracy and speed, and increases hesitation. This study is important for understanding and treating ADHD.
RESEARCH IN DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES
(2023)
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Samantha J. Gustafson, Loren Nelson, Jack W. Silcox
Summary: This study examined the effect of distraction on speech recognition and listening effort, and assessed the impact of distraction on resource allocation during listening. The results showed that distraction significantly reduced speech recognition in low-perceptual load conditions (i.e., quiet), but had no effect in high-perceptual load conditions (i.e., noise). In terms of listening effort, distraction resulted in longer response times regardless of listening condition.
Article
Neurosciences
Claudia Contadini-Wright, Kaho Magami, Nishchay Mehta, Maria Chait
Summary: Listening in noisy environments requires active engagement of attention and other cognitive abilities, as well as increased arousal. Pupil dilation and microsaccades were measured in young participants performing a speech-in-noise task under high and low listening load conditions. Pupil dilation was associated with increased arousal under load, while microsaccade rate was modulated by listening load and localized during periods of high auditory attention demands. These findings highlight the importance of studying the temporal dynamics of auditory attentional processing in effortful listening conditions.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Acoustics
Andreas Jonas Fuglsig, Jesper Jensen, Zheng-Hua Tan, Lars Sondergaard Bertelsen, Jens Christian Lindof, Jan Ostergaard
Summary: The intelligibility and quality of speech can be improved by preprocessing the speech signal known as near-end listening enhancement (NLE). Existing NLE techniques can greatly increase intelligibility in harsh noise environments, but in favorable noise conditions, the intelligibility reaches a limit. This article presents a new rationale for NLE that minimally processes the target speech while satisfying a performance constraint, such as intelligibility, and achieves speech quality on par or better than existing methods.
IEEE-ACM TRANSACTIONS ON AUDIO SPEECH AND LANGUAGE PROCESSING
(2023)
Article
Gerontology
Ronan McGarrigle, Sarah Knight, Lyndon Rakusen, Jason Geller, Sven Mattys
Summary: The study found that older adults exhibit larger and faster changes in pupil response when listening to speech in adverse conditions compared to younger adults, indicating a more sustained allocation of attentional resources. Additionally, older adults reported higher levels of listening-related fatigue in the social domain compared to young adults.
PSYCHOLOGY AND AGING
(2021)
Article
Neurosciences
Liu-Fang Zhou, Dan Zhao, Xuan Cui, Bingbing Guo, Fangwei Zhu, Chunliang Feng, Jinhui Wang, Ming Meng
Summary: This study reveals two anatomically and functionally dissociated subsystems supporting goal-directed speech listening, with areas in the bilateral temporal cortex and lateral prefrontal cortex consistently showing activation while areas in the parietal cortex only responding reliably when the task goal remains the same.
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Briony Banks, Emma Gowen, Kevin J. Munro, Patti Adank
Summary: This study aimed to investigate the impact of visual cues from a speaker's face on perceptual adaptation to degraded speech. The findings showed that longer fixations on the speaker's mouth were related to better overall accuracy, but the actual improvement in adaptation was not as significant as previously thought.
JOURNAL OF SPEECH LANGUAGE AND HEARING RESEARCH
(2021)
Article
Neurosciences
Maya Kaufman, Elana Zion Golumbic
Summary: Speech comprehension is compromised when multiple people talk at once, but top-down attention mechanisms can prioritize task-relevant speech. A study using magnetoencephalography (MEG) found that both selective and distributed attention tasks engaged similar brain regions, but the neural representation showed a bias towards one speaker during both tasks. This suggests a bottleneck for co-representation of competing speech and the importance of toggling attention between speakers over time.
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Mathieu Ferschneider, Annie Moulin
Summary: This study aimed to assess listening effort in both quiet and noisy daily situations for adults with hearing aids and those with normal hearing. The results showed that the experience of using hearing aids was the most important factor affecting listening effort in noisy situations, while it had a smaller impact on listening effort in quiet environments. The Extended Effort Assessment Scale (EEAS) was able to evaluate listening effort in both quiet and noisy environments, and different factors influenced the two situations.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Abin Kuruvilla-Mathew, Peter R. Thorne, Suzanne C. Purdy
Summary: This study investigated factors affecting successful listening in older adults and explored the corresponding neural activity. The results revealed age-related differences in attention and temporal processing, as well as differences in neural activity related to signal degradation. Older participants showed poorer performance on the number comparison task and required higher signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) compared to younger participants. Age-related changes were observed in neural processing, particularly in the early-N1 and later-P3 time windows. Source localization analyses showed age differences in source activity for the degraded listening condition, which negatively correlated with task performance in the older group. These findings suggest a reallocation of processing resources in older adults during demanding listening tasks.
Article
Neurosciences
Ehsan Eqlimi, Annelies Bockstael, Marc Schonwiesner, Durk Talsma, Dick Botteldooren
Summary: This study explores how auditory distractions influence the process of information encoding during speech comprehension. The findings showed that when attention was directed towards speech, the complexity and unpredictability of microstate dynamics increased. Coping with background noise during speech comprehension demands sustained cognitive effort. Additionally, there were two stages of time course for microstate complexity and alpha-to-theta power ratio.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Psychology
J. Devin McAuley, Yi Shen, Toni Smith, Gary R. Kidd
Summary: Recent research showed that altering the rhythm of target speech affects target recognition, while altering background speech rhythm can enhance target recognition. The study found that the target-rhythm effect was present with all backgrounds, but the background-rhythm effect was mainly observed in same-sex background conditions.
ATTENTION PERCEPTION & PSYCHOPHYSICS
(2021)
Article
Geriatrics & Gerontology
Bjorn Herrmann, Burkhard Maess, Ingrid S. Johnsrude
Summary: Research found that older adults exhibit hyperresponsiveness to sound onsets in the auditory cortex compared to younger adults, while showing reduced sustained neural activity in processing sound patterns. This difference in neural populations between younger and older individuals could help explain age-related changes in hearing sensitivity.
NEUROBIOLOGY OF AGING
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Stephen C. Van Hedger, Ingrid S. Johnsrude, Laura J. Batterink
Summary: Listeners' prior musical knowledge may interfere with the learning of new statistical regularities in novel tone sequences, with training on familiar instruments leading to reduced accuracy. Familiar intervals found in Western music may also bias judgments of the grammaticality of the sequences.
Article
Neurosciences
Harrison Ritz, Conor J. Wild, Ingrid S. Johnsrude
Summary: This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the processing of spoken sentences under distraction, and found that more cognitive effort is required when dealing with degraded speech. Moreover, the study showed that attention-related regions are affected when speech quality declines during processing of clear speech.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Vanessa C. Irsik, Ingrid S. Johnsrude, Bjorn Herrmann
Summary: Fluctuating background sounds can enhance speech intelligibility. Recent research indicates that using continuous speech materials, such as spoken stories, can qualitatively change speech listening in noisy environments. Older adults experience less masking release compared to younger adults when listening to disconnected sentences and stories with randomized sentence order. However, when listening to engaging and coherent narratives, older adults show equal or greater masking release compared to younger adults.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2022)
Article
Clinical Neurology
Loretta Norton, Karnig Kazazian, Teneille Gofton, Derek B. Debicki, Davinia Fernandez-Espejo, Jonathan E. Peelle, Eyad Al Thenayan, G. Bryan Young, Adrian M. Owen
Summary: This study aimed to investigate the efficacy of functional neuroimaging in assessing cognitive function in acute disorders of consciousness. The results showed that functional neuroimaging could detect preserved auditory function and language comprehension, and even reveal covert conscious awareness in patients. Furthermore, there was a positive relationship between fMRI responsivity and the level of functional recovery.
ANNALS OF NEUROLOGY
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Amanda M. Fullerton, Deborah A. Vickers, Robert Luke, Addison N. Billing, David McAlpine, Heivet Hernandez-Perez, Jonathan E. Peelle, Jessica J. M. Monaghan, Catherine M. McMahon
Summary: This study aims to understand the responses and functional connectivity of auditory and visual cortices to speech and non-speech stimuli in postlingually deaf cochlear implant users and found that they show beneficial effects in cross-modal activity. Specifically, an increase in connectivity between the left auditory and visual cortices is positively correlated with their abilities to understand speech in background noise.
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Bjorn Herrmann, Burkhard Maess, Ingrid S. Johnsrude
Summary: This study investigates the effects of age on neural responses to different types of modulations, such as amplitude and frequency modulations. The results show that older adults have stronger neural synchronization but weaker sustained neural activity compared to younger adults. This indicates age differences in the sensitivity of the auditory system to features present in speech and other natural sounds.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Benedikt Zoefel, Rebecca Gilbert, Matthew Davis
Summary: Auditory rhythms are found in music, speech, and other everyday sounds, but it is unclear how perceived rhythms are created from repetitive sound structures. Research shows that for intelligible speech, rhythm perception is influenced not only by acoustic properties but also by linguistic units extracted from the speech.
Article
Psychology, Biological
Drew J. McLaughlin, Maggie E. Zink, Lauren Gaunt, Jamie Reilly, Mitchell S. Sommers, Kristin J. Van Engen, Jonathan E. Peelle
Summary: In this study, we investigated how to reduce the effects of pupil fatigue through intervention. We found that only breaks with social interaction significantly reduced the fatigue of pupil response. However, regardless of the protocol, the task-evoked pupil response was consistently diminished over the course of the experiment. Therefore, pupil attenuation should be taken into account in experimental designs and statistical models.
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Emma Holmes, Ingrid S. Johnsrude
Summary: Speech is more intelligible when spoken by familiar voices, possibly due to more accurate representation of key voice characteristics. However, discrimination thresholds for familiar voices are not smaller. The results support cognitive accounts of speech perception.
Article
Neurosciences
Bjorn Herrmann, Burkhard Maess, Molly J. Henry, Jonas Obleser, Ingrid S. Johnsrude
Summary: Listening in everyday life requires the dynamic deployment of attention in order to conserve mental resources, especially for older adults. This study used electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography to investigate the neural and behavioral mechanics of attention regulation during listening and how aging affects these processes. The results showed that younger and older adults employ different neural control strategies to regulate attention in time under listening challenges, with a notable difference in the sources of alpha activity between age groups.
Article
Psychology, Developmental
Alaa T. Ibrahim, Afiqah Yusuf, Hannah Pickard, Pamela Dixon, Andy Shih, Stephanie Shire, Andrew Pickles, Mayada Elsabbagh
Summary: The COVID-19 pandemic has created significant barriers to training by limiting in-person professional activities, resulting in the emergence of remote training. In this study, a remote training approach was developed and evaluated for master trainers of the Caregiver Skills Training Program. Despite the pandemic preventing practice with children, participants were able to reliably identify program strategies through video recordings. These findings highlight the feasibility and value of remote training approaches in implementing interventions.
Review
Linguistics
Aahana Bajracharya, Jonathan E. Peelle
Summary: Although group-level fMRI results are commonly used to study the neurobiology of language, neglecting the complexities of individual brains may undermine the validity of findings. Understanding brain organization in individuals is crucial for both basic science and clinical applications. A systematic review of studies published until April 2020 reveals a relatively small number of papers that quantify single-subject reliability, creating challenges for comparisons across studies. Future efforts should focus on standardizing and reporting reliability metrics to optimize language network localization in individuals.
JOURNAL OF NEUROLINGUISTICS
(2023)
Editorial Material
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Holly Robson, Harriet Thomasson, Matthew H. Davis
Summary: The use of telepractice in aphasia research and therapy is increasing, but language comprehension assessments are not always easily translated to an online environment. This project aimed to develop teleassessments for individuals with language comprehension impairments, and found that people with aphasia can engage in teleassessment with limited carer support.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE & COMMUNICATION DISORDERS
(2023)
Article
Linguistics
Lucy J. MacGregor, Rebecca A. Gilbert, Zuzanna Balewski, Daniel J. Mitchell, Sharon W. Erzinclioglu, Jennifer M. Rodd, John Duncan, Evelina Fedorenko, Matthew H. Davis
Summary: The study investigated the role of domain-general multiple demand (MD) regions and domain-selective language regions in understanding language, finding that the MD network plays a key role in processing speech with acoustic degradation, while language regions are more involved in updating word meaning preferences.
NEUROBIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE
(2022)