PMID: 19928398Nov 26, 2009Paper

Processing interaural cues in sound segregation by young and middle-aged brains

Journal of the American Academy of Audiology
Ilse J A WambacqDavid Cooper

Abstract

When listening to one speaker while another conversation is occurring simultaneously, we separate the competing sounds by processing physical cues such as common onset time, intensity, frequency harmonicity, and spatial location of the sound sources. Spatial location is determined in large part by differences in arrival of a sound at one ear versus the other ear, otherwise known as interaural time difference (ITD) or interaural phase difference (IPD). There is ample anecdotal evidence that middle-aged adults experience greater difficulty listening to speech in noise, even when their audiological evaluation does not reveal abnormal results. Furthermore, it has been shown that the frequency range for IPD processing is reduced in middle-aged adults compared to young adults, even though morphological changes in the auditory evoked potential (AEP) response were only observed in older adults. The purpose of the current study was to examine early aging effects (< 60 years) on IPD processing in concurrent sound segregation. We examined the change AEP evoked by detection of a mistuned and/or phase-shifted second harmonic during the last 1500 msec of a 3000 msec amplitude-modulated harmonic complex. A passive listening paradigm was used....Continue Reading

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