Neural correlation of speech envelope tracking for background noise in normal hearing

HyunJung An; JeeWon Lee; Myung-Whan Suh; Yoonseob Lim

doi:10.3389/fnins.2023.1268591

Neural correlation of speech envelope tracking for background noise in normal hearing

Front Neurosci. 2023 Oct 17:17:1268591. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2023.1268591. eCollection 2023.

Authors

HyunJung An¹, JeeWon Lee^{1

2}, Myung-Whan Suh³, Yoonseob Lim^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ Center for Intelligent and Interactive Robotics, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
² Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
³ Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Seoul National University Hospital, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
⁴ Department of HY-KIST Bio-convergence, Hanyang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.

Abstract

Everyday speech communication often occurs in environments with background noise, and the impact of noise on speech recognition can vary depending on factors such as noise type, noise intensity, and the listener's hearing ability. However, the extent to which neural mechanisms in speech understanding are influenced by different types and levels of noise remains unknown. This study aims to investigate whether individuals exhibit distinct neural responses and attention strategies depending on noise conditions. We recorded electroencephalography (EEG) data from 20 participants with normal hearing (13 males) and evaluated both neural tracking of speech envelopes and behavioral performance in speech understanding in the presence of varying types of background noise. Participants engaged in an EEG experiment consisting of two separate sessions. The first session involved listening to a 12-min story presented binaurally without any background noise. In the second session, speech understanding scores were measured using matrix sentences presented under speech-shaped noise (SSN) and Story noise background noise conditions at noise levels corresponding to sentence recognitions score (SRS). We observed differences in neural envelope correlation depending on noise type but not on its level. Interestingly, the impact of noise type on the variation in envelope tracking was more significant among participants with higher speech perception scores, while those with lower scores exhibited similarities in envelope correlation regardless of the noise condition. The findings suggest that even individuals with normal hearing could adopt different strategies to understand speech in challenging listening environments, depending on the type of noise.

Keywords: background noise type; electroencephalography; energetic masking; informational masking; neural decoding; speech understanding in noise.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported in part by the KIST Institutional Program (2E31084) and in part by the National Research Council of Science & Technology (NST) grant by the Korea Government (MSIT) (no. CAP21052-200).