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Impact of Auditory Training on Cortical Neural Tracking of Rapid Speech in Aging and Hearing Loss
Poster Session D, Saturday, September 13, 5:00 - 6:30 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Ciaran Stone1, Lucia Z-Rivera1, Ebtesam Sajjadi1, Samira Anderson1; 1University of Maryland
The ability to understand rapid speech relies on the capacity of the auditory system to process fine-grained temporal features of the acoustic signal. Aging and hearing loss can disrupt this precision and increase difficulty in recognizing time-compressed speech. Age-related changes are associated with altered cortical temporal dynamics, including exaggerated and delayed representations of speech. These patterns are likely related to compensatory neural mechanisms that emerge in response to degraded input but often fail to restore speech perception fully. Such mechanisms may influence processing across multiple levels, from early sensory encoding to higher-order cognitive and linguistic representations. The present study investigates whether auditory training for rapid speech (i.e., time-compressed speech) can improve behavioral performance and cortical processing and whether these changes can be detected for both linguistic neural representations and sensory representations. A total of 94 participants were recruited, comprising younger normal-hearing (YNH), older normal-hearing (ONH), and older hearing-impaired (OHI) adults. All listeners completed pre- and post-training sessions, including a behavioral assessment of time-compression thresholds for 50% keyword recognition, and electrophysiology (EEG) recordings (cortical envelope tracking) of continuous speech under unprocessed and time-compressed conditions. All participants completed six sessions of adaptive training in time-compressed speech after a pre-session. The training increased or decreased in difficulty by adjusting the time-compression rate based on participant performance. Results showed a significant training effect on behavioral measures, with both ONH and OHI groups demonstrating improved performance at the post-test. While younger listeners maintained the highest overall performance, post-training thresholds in the ONH group approached pre-training levels of the YNH group. These findings suggest partial restoration of rapid speech recognition through targeted training, particularly for older adults with normal hearing. Cortical EEG data will be analyzed using a Temporal Response Function (TRF) framework to evaluate training-related changes in neural encoding. TRFs will be modeled at multiple sensory and linguistic levels: acoustic feature, phoneme, word, noun phrase, verb phrase, and sentence onsets will be used as predictors. Previous findings showed exaggerated cortical tracking responses in older adults, which may reflect maladaptive cortical plasticity. We aim to investigate whether auditory training reduces this exaggeration and results in more efficient cortical encoding of time-compressed speech. This work was supported by NIA P01AG055365.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception, Control, Selection, and Executive Processes