Effects of Noise and Age on the Infant Brainstem Response to Speech

Speech perception depends on healthy sound transduction and faithful encoding of speech sound acoustics. Background noise can distort frequency analysis in the inner ear and disrupt auditory processing more centrally, making speech sounds difficult to decode. Problems in the middle ear, inner ear or central nervous system can exacerbate difficulties in hearing speech in noise, including early conductive hearing impairment (Keogh et al., 2010), sensorineural hearing loss at low or high frequencies (Laukli et al., 1985, Horwitz et al., 2002), diminished linguistic content during development (Cooper et al., 1989, Lieu, 2004, Stelmachowicz et al., 2004, Eisenberg, 2007, Moeller et al., 2015), and attention (Soderlund et al., 2016) or memory problems (McCreery et al., 2017, Millman et al., 2017).

https://ift.tt/2NAe54Q