Children are known to be particularly vulnerable to the effects of noise on speech perception, and it is commonly acknowledged that failure of central auditory processes can lead to these difficulties with speech-in-noise (SIN) perception. However, little is known about the mechanistic relationship between central processes and the perception of SIN. Our aims were twofold: to examine the effect...

INTRODUCTION Individuals with the same ability of speech recognition in quiet can have extremely different results in noisy environments. OBJECTIVE To standardize speech perception in adults with normal hearing in the free field using the Brazilian Hearing in Noise Test. METHODS Contemporary, cross-sectional cohort study. 79 adults with normal hearing and without cognitive impairment partic...

Much of our daily communication occurs in the presence of background noise, compromising our ability to hear. While understanding speech in noise is a challenge for everyone, it becomes increasingly difficult as we age. Although aging is generally accompanied by hearing loss, this perceptual decline cannot fully account for the difficulties experienced by older adults for hearing in noise. Decr...

Noise reduction is often essential for cochlear implant (CI) recipients to achieve acceptable speech perception in noisy environments. Most noise reduction algorithms applied to audio signals are based on time-frequency representations of the input, such as the Fourier transform. Algorithms based on other representations may also be able to provide comparable or improved speech perception and l...

In this paper, we investigate the relative perceptual importance of the temporal envelop (TE) and temporal fine structure (TFS) between tonal language and non-tonal language perception. The “auditory chimera” experiment is conducted on both American English and Mandarin Chinese with the same conditions. Our experimental results show that there is no significant perceptual difference of TE and T...

Older adults frequently complain that while they can hear a person talking, they cannot understand what is being said; this difficulty is exacerbated by background noise. Peripheral hearing loss cannot fully account for this age-related decline in speech-in-noise ability, as declines in central processing also contribute to this problem. Given that musicians have enhanced speech-in-noise percep...