TY - JOUR
T1 - Effects of Age on Cortical Tracking of Word-Level Features of Continuous Competing Speech
AU - Mesik, Juraj
AU - Ray, Lucia
AU - Wojtczak, Magdalena
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Copyright © 2021 Mesik, Ray and Wojtczak.
PY - 2021/4/1
Y1 - 2021/4/1
N2 - Speech-in-noise comprehension difficulties are common among the elderly population, yet traditional objective measures of speech perception are largely insensitive to this deficit, particularly in the absence of clinical hearing loss. In recent years, a growing body of research in young normal-hearing adults has demonstrated that high-level features related to speech semantics and lexical predictability elicit strong centro-parietal negativity in the EEG signal around 400 ms following the word onset. Here we investigate effects of age on cortical tracking of these word-level features within a two-talker speech mixture, and their relationship with self-reported difficulties with speech-in-noise understanding. While undergoing EEG recordings, younger and older adult participants listened to a continuous narrative story in the presence of a distractor story. We then utilized forward encoding models to estimate cortical tracking of four speech features: (1) word onsets, (2) “semantic” dissimilarity of each word relative to the preceding context, (3) lexical surprisal for each word, and (4) overall word audibility. Our results revealed robust tracking of all features for attended speech, with surprisal and word audibility showing significantly stronger contributions to neural activity than dissimilarity. Additionally, older adults exhibited significantly stronger tracking of word-level features than younger adults, especially over frontal electrode sites, potentially reflecting increased listening effort. Finally, neuro-behavioral analyses revealed trends of a negative relationship between subjective speech-in-noise perception difficulties and the model goodness-of-fit for attended speech, as well as a positive relationship between task performance and the goodness-of-fit, indicating behavioral relevance of these measures. Together, our results demonstrate the utility of modeling cortical responses to multi-talker speech using complex, word-level features and the potential for their use to study changes in speech processing due to aging and hearing loss.
AB - Speech-in-noise comprehension difficulties are common among the elderly population, yet traditional objective measures of speech perception are largely insensitive to this deficit, particularly in the absence of clinical hearing loss. In recent years, a growing body of research in young normal-hearing adults has demonstrated that high-level features related to speech semantics and lexical predictability elicit strong centro-parietal negativity in the EEG signal around 400 ms following the word onset. Here we investigate effects of age on cortical tracking of these word-level features within a two-talker speech mixture, and their relationship with self-reported difficulties with speech-in-noise understanding. While undergoing EEG recordings, younger and older adult participants listened to a continuous narrative story in the presence of a distractor story. We then utilized forward encoding models to estimate cortical tracking of four speech features: (1) word onsets, (2) “semantic” dissimilarity of each word relative to the preceding context, (3) lexical surprisal for each word, and (4) overall word audibility. Our results revealed robust tracking of all features for attended speech, with surprisal and word audibility showing significantly stronger contributions to neural activity than dissimilarity. Additionally, older adults exhibited significantly stronger tracking of word-level features than younger adults, especially over frontal electrode sites, potentially reflecting increased listening effort. Finally, neuro-behavioral analyses revealed trends of a negative relationship between subjective speech-in-noise perception difficulties and the model goodness-of-fit for attended speech, as well as a positive relationship between task performance and the goodness-of-fit, indicating behavioral relevance of these measures. Together, our results demonstrate the utility of modeling cortical responses to multi-talker speech using complex, word-level features and the potential for their use to study changes in speech processing due to aging and hearing loss.
KW - aging
KW - electroencephalography
KW - lexical surprisal
KW - semantic processing
KW - speech perception
KW - speech-in-noise (SIN) perception
KW - temporal response function (TRF)
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85104194976&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85104194976&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3389/fnins.2021.635126
DO - 10.3389/fnins.2021.635126
M3 - Article
C2 - 33867920
AN - SCOPUS:85104194976
SN - 1662-4548
VL - 15
JO - Frontiers in Neuroscience
JF - Frontiers in Neuroscience
M1 - 635126
ER -