Effect of Titrated Exposure to Non-Traumatic Noise on Unvoiced Speech Recognition in Human Listeners with Normal Audiological Profiles

Mengchao Zhang*, Richard M. Stern, Deborah Moncrieff, Catherine Palmer, Christopher A. Brown

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Non-traumatic noise exposure has been shown in animal models to impact the processing of envelope cues. However, evidence in human studies has been conflicting, possibly because the measures have not been specifically parameterized based on listeners’ exposure profiles. The current study examined young dental-school students, whose exposure to high-frequency non-traumatic dental-drill noise during their course of study is systematic and precisely quantifiable. Twenty-five dental students and twenty-seven non-dental participants were recruited. The listeners were asked to recognize unvoiced sentences that were processed to contain only envelope cues useful for recognition and have been filtered to frequency regions inside or outside the dental noise spectrum. The sentences were presented either in quiet or in one of the noise maskers, including a steady-state noise, a 16-Hz or 32-Hz temporally modulated noise, or a spectrally modulated noise. The dental students showed no difference from the control group in demographic information, audiological screening outcomes, extended high-frequency thresholds, or unvoiced speech in quiet, but consistently performed more poorly for unvoiced speech recognition in modulated noise. The group difference in noise depended on the filtering conditions. The dental group's degraded performances were observed in temporally modulated noise for high-pass filtered condition only and in spectrally modulated noise for low-pass filtered condition only. The current findings provide the most direct evidence to date of a link between non-traumatic noise exposure and supra-threshold envelope processing issues in human listeners despite the normal audiological profiles.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-15
Number of pages15
JournalTrends in Hearing
Volume26
Early online date5 Aug 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 5 Aug 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, (grant number R21DC018408, PhD Student Research Award).

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage)

Keywords

  • noise exposure
  • spectrotemporal envelope processing
  • speech in noise
  • cochlear synaptopathy

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