Complex sound analysis in normal and impaired ears

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The purpose of this project is to determine the nature of the hearing difficulties experienced by listeners whose ability to hear quiet sounds like pure tones is still relatively good. One particular focus of the project is on older listeners who, despte normal audiograms, find understanding speech in background sounds difficult. For comparison, younger listeners with cochlear hearing loss will also be examined. The framework of the project is structured around 3 Specific Aims. The first Aim explores the possibility that normal thresholds in quiet can belie permanent neural dysfunction at the level of the auditory nerve, a situation that parallels noise exposure work showing that recovery of sensitivity following acoustic over-exposure can occur despite residual nerve damage. This Aim will lead to a better delineation of the sound-processing deficits that exist in the face of apparently good hearing. The second Aim focuses on auditory brainstem responses [ABRs] evoked by complex sounds like speech. This type of ABR testing is rapidly growing in usage but much remains to be understood about the basic response. The immediate goal of the second Aim is to study the particular situation of age-related differences in the speech-evoked ABR, but the broader objective is to use this study as a vehicle to better understand the multiplicity of factors that contribute to the generation of the speech-evoked ABR both in the normal and cochlear-impaired auditory system. The final Aim contributes a new perspective on factors that affect speech understanding in everyday listening environments where the background sound is typically fluctuating in both time and frequency making the glimpses of target speech themselves dynamically vary across these dimensions as well as across ears. Together, these three Aims combine to provide a series of parallel studies that will significantly advance our understanding of the processing of complex sounds like speech in challenging listening environments, even for people with relatively good hearing.