Title | Brainstem encoding of frequency-modulated sweeps is relevant to Mandarin concurrent-vowels identification for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners |
Authors | Fu, Zhen Yang, Hongying Chen, Fei Wu, Xihong Chen, Jing |
Affiliation | Peking Univ, Dept Machine Intelligence, Speech & Hearing Res Ctr, Key Lab Machine Percept,Minist Educ, Beijing 100871, Peoples R China Southern Univ Sci & Technol, Dept Elect & Elect Engn, 1088 Xueyuan Blvd, Shenzhen 518055, Peoples R China |
Keywords | Concurrent-vowels identification Frequency modulation detection Frequency-following responses Hearing impairment |
Issue Date | 2019 |
Publisher | HEARING RESEARCH |
Abstract | F0 contours convey the primary information of lexical Tones for Mandarin Chinese, and the processing of time-varying F0 contours is important for Mandarin concurrent-vowels identification (MCVI). In this work, we examined the relationship between frequency modulation (FM) detection of auditory system and MCVI in both normal-hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) listeners. Three experiments were conducted with the same subjects to measure their MCVI, FM detection limen (FMDL), and frequency following responses (FFRs) evoked by FM sweeps, respectively. To ensure that F0 contour was the primary cue utilized, mean F0s and durations were equalized among all test vowels in the MCVI experiment. To simulate the pattern of F0 contours of Mandarin vowels, linearly FM sweeps were used as stimuli in the FMDL and FFRs experiments. The results confirmed that the performance of HI listeners was significantly worse than that of NH listeners in all of the three measurements. Besides, FFRs evoked by FM sweeps had significantly lower tracking accuracy than those evoked by steady tones only for HI listeners. The correlation analysis further revealed that any two of the three measured indices were significantly correlated when the effects of age and absolute threshold were partialed out (vertical bar r vertical bar >= 0.502, p <= 0.017). These results suggested an association between the poor performance of HI listeners in the MCVI task and their degraded auditory function on FM detection, and such a behavioral degradation has emerged in the phase-locking activity at the brainstem level. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier B.V. |
URI | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11897/545559 |
ISSN | 0378-5955 |
DOI | 10.1016/j.heares.2019.06.005 |
Indexed | SCI(E) SSCI(E) EI |
Appears in Collections: | 信息科学技术学院 机器感知与智能教育部重点实验室 |