The Effects of Hearing Loss on the Neural Encoding of Speech

Abstract

One of the most common complaints of people with cochlear hearing loss concerns difficulty with speech communication especially in noisy environments. Successful perception of speech in noise is dependent on cognitive factors as well as sound processing at peripheral, subcortical and cortical level. Both behavioral and physiological measures have been used to understand the important factors that contribute to perception-in-noise abilities. Subcortical and cortical evoked responses originate from different regions in the auditory pathway, representing acoustic information via distinct neural codes. Subcortical auditory responses represent the acoustics of the evoking stimulus with high fidelity, while cortical evoked responses provide a more abstract representation of sound.