Perceptual sensitivity to, and electrophysiological encoding of, a complex periodic signal: effects of age

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate perceptual and electrophysiological encoding of complex periodic signals as a function of age.

Design: Two groups of adults completed three listening tasks: a behavioural task of detection of a mistuned harmonic component in a complex tone, an electrophysiological measure of speech-evoked auditory brainstem response (sABR), and a speech-in-noise measure. Between group comparisons were undertaken for each task as well as pairwise correlation analyses for all tasks.

Study sample: One group of younger adults (n = 20) and one group of older adults (n = 20) participated. All listeners had relatively normal audiometric thresholds (≤20 dB HL) from 250–4000 Hz.

Results: Younger adults had better results than the older adults on all three tasks: sensitivity for detecting a mistuned harmonic, spectral encoding for sABR, and release from masking for the speech-in-noise test. There were no significant correlations between measures when evaluating the older adults in isolation.

Conclusions: The results are consistent with the body of literature that demonstrates reduced temporal processing abilities for older adults. The combined method approach undertaken in this investigation did not result in correlations between the perceptual and electrophysiological measures of temporal processing.

KEYWORDS:

• Ageing
• temporal processing
• speech-evoked ABR
• periodicity coding

Note

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The MoCA was not administered to the first four older adults enrolled in the study. They completed the Mini-Mental Status Examination (MMSE; Folstein et al., 1975) and scored ≥29 out of 30.

Additional information

Funding

Support for this research was provided by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIDCD) under Grants 1-F32-DC012217 (SKM) and 5-R01-DC001507 (JHG).