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In the original version of the chapter, the labels on the x-axis of Figure 2, panels A and B were wrong. This incorrect figure has been replaced with the below figure.

Within the cochlea, broadband sounds like speech and music are filtered into a series of narrowband signals, each of which can be considered as a relatively slowly varying envelope (ENV) imposed on a rapidly oscillating carrier (the temporal fine structure, TFS). Information about ENV and TFS is conveyed in the timing and short-term rate of nerve spikes in the auditory nerve. There is evidence that both hearing loss and increasing age adversely affect the ability to use TFS information, but in many studies the effects of hearing loss and age have been confounded. This paper summarises evidence from studies that allow some separation of the effects of hearing loss and age. The results suggest that the monaural processing of TFS information, which is important for the perception of pitch and for segregating speech from background sounds, is adversely affected by both hearing loss and increasing age, the former being more important. The monaural processing of ENV information is hardly affected by hearing loss or by increasing age. The binaural processing of TFS information, which is important for sound localisation and the binaural masking level difference, is also adversely affected by both hearing loss and increasing age, but here the latter seems more important. The deterioration of binaural TFS processing with increasing age appears to start relatively early in life. The binaural processing of ENV information also deteriorates somewhat with increasing age. The reduced binaural processing abilities found for older/hearing-impaired listeners may partially account for the difficulties that such listeners experience in situations where the target speech and interfering sounds come from different directions in space, as is common in everyday life.

Auditory two-tone suppression is a nearly instantaneous reduction in the response of the basilar membrane to a tone or noise when a second tone or noise is presented simultaneously. Previous behavioural studies provide conflicting evidence on whether suppression changes with increasing age, and aging effects may depend on whether a suppressor above (high-side) or below (low-side) the signal frequency is used. Most previous studies have measured suppression using stimuli long enough to elicit the medial olivocochlear reflex (MOCR), a sound-elicited reflex that reduces cochlear amplification or gain. It has a ˵sluggish˶ onset of approximately 25 ms. There is physiological evidence that suppression may be reduced or altered by elicitation of the MOCR. In the present study, suppression was measured behaviourally in younger adults and older adults using a forward-masking paradigm with 20-ms and 70-ms maskers and suppressors. In experiment 1, gain was estimated by comparing on-frequency (2 kHz) and off-frequency (1.2 kHz) masker thresholds for a short, fixed-level 2-kHz signal. In experiment 2, the fixed-level signal was preceded by an off-frequency suppressor (1.2 or 2.4 kHz) presented simultaneously with the on-frequency masker. A suppressor level was chosen that did not produce any forward masking of the signal. Suppression was measured as the difference in on-frequency masker threshold with and without the suppressor present. The effects of age on gain and suppression estimates will be discussed.

The performance of a lateralization task based on interaural time or level differences (ITDs or ILDs) often varies among listeners. This study examined the extent to which this inter-listener variation could be accounted for by the coding efficiency of the temporal-structure or level information below the stage of interaural interaction. Young listeners (20s to 30s) and early-elderly (60s) listeners with or without mild hearing loss were tested. The , and tasks were intended to measure sensitivities to ITDs, ILDs, the temporal structure of the stimulus encoded by the neural phase locking, and the stimulus level, respectively. The performances of the and tasks were not significantly different between the age groups, while the elderly listeners exhibited significantly poorer performance in the task (and in the with a high-frequency stimulus only) than the young listeners. Significant correlations were found between thresholds for the and tasks with low- and high-frequency stimuli and for the and tasks for the high-frequency stimulus, implying peripheral coding efficiency as a major factor determining lateralization performance. However, we failed to find a correlation between the and tasks for the low-frequency stimulus, despite a large range of threshold values in the task. This implies that in a low frequency region, the peripheral coding efficiency of the stimulus temporal structure is a relatively minor factor in the ITD-based lateralization performance.

With the advent of cognitive hearing science, increased attention has been given to individual differences in cognitive functioning and their explanatory power in accounting for inter-listener variability in understanding speech in noise (SiN). The psychological construct that has received most interest is working memory (WM), representing the ability to simultaneously store and process information. Common lore and theoretical models assume that WM-based processes subtend speech processing in adverse perceptual conditions, such as those associated with hearing loss or background noise. Empirical evidence confirms the association between WM capacity (WMC) and SiN identification in older hearing-impaired listeners. To assess whether WMC also plays a role when listeners without hearing loss process speech in acoustically adverse conditions, we surveyed published and unpublished studies in which the Reading-Span test (a widely used measure of WMC) was administered in conjunction with a measure of SiN identification. The survey revealed little or no evidence for an association between WMC and SiN performance. We also analysed new data from 132 normal-hearing participants sampled from across the adult lifespan (18–91 years), for a relationship between Reading-Span scores and identification of matrix sentences in noise. Performance on both tasks declined with age, and correlated weakly even after controlling for the effects of age and audibility ( = 0.39,  ≤ 0.001, one-tailed). However, separate analyses for different age groups revealed that the correlation was only significant for middle-aged and older groups but not for the young (< 40 years) participants.

Understanding the causes for speech-in-noise (SiN) perception difficulties is complex, and is made even more difficult by the fact that listening situations can vary widely in target and background sounds. While there is general agreement that both auditory and cognitive factors are important, their exact relationship to SiN perception across various listening situations remains unclear. This study manipulated the characteristics of the listening situation in two ways: first, target stimuli were either isolated words, or words heard in the context of low- (LP) and high-predictability (HP) sentences; second, the background sound, speech-modulated noise, was presented at two signal-to-noise ratios. Speech intelligibility was measured for 30 older listeners (aged 62–84) with age-normal hearing and related to individual differences in cognition (working memory, inhibition and linguistic skills) and hearing (PTA and temporal processing). The results showed that while the effect of hearing thresholds on intelligibility was rather uniform, the influence of cognitive abilities was more specific to a certain listening situation. By revealing a complex picture of relationships between intelligibility and cognition, these results may help us understand some of the inconsistencies in the literature as regards cognitive contributions to speech perception.

Normal-hearing listeners use acoustic cues in speech to interpret a speaker’s emotional state. This study investigates the effect of hearing aids on the perception of the emotion dimensions arousal (aroused/calm) and valence (positive/negative attitude) in older adults with hearing loss. More specifically, we investigate whether wearing a hearing aid improves the correlation between affect ratings and affect-related acoustic parameters. To that end, affect ratings by 23 hearing-aid users were compared for aided and unaided listening. Moreover, these ratings were compared to the ratings by an age-matched group of 22 participants with age-normal hearing.

For arousal, hearing-aid users rated utterances as generally more aroused in the aided than in the unaided condition. Intensity differences were the strongest indictor of degree of arousal. Among the hearing-aid users, those with poorer hearing used additional prosodic cues (i.e., tempo and pitch) for their arousal ratings, compared to those with relatively good hearing. For valence, pitch was the only acoustic cue that was associated with valence. Neither listening condition nor hearing loss severity (differences among the hearing-aid users) influenced affect ratings or the use of affect-related acoustic parameters. Compared to the normal-hearing reference group, ratings of hearing-aid users in the aided condition did not generally differ in both emotion dimensions. However, hearing-aid users were more sensitive to intensity differences in their arousal ratings than the normal-hearing participants.

We conclude that the use of hearing aids is important for the rehabilitation of affect perception and particularly influences the interpretation of arousal.

Although bilateral cochlear implants (BiCIs) have succeeded in improving the spatial hearing performance of bilateral CI users, the overall performance is still not comparable with normal hearing listeners. Limited success can be partially caused by an interaural mismatch of the place-of-stimulation in each cochlea. Pairing matched interaural CI electrodes and stimulating them with the same frequency band is expected to facilitate binaural functions such as binaural fusion, localization, or spatial release from masking. It has been shown in animal experiments that the magnitude of the binaural interaction component (BIC) derived from the wave-eV decreases for increasing interaural place of stimulation mismatch. This motivated the investigation of the suitability of an electroencephalography-based objective electrode-frequency fitting procedure based on the BIC for BiCI users. A 61 channel monaural and binaural electrically evoked auditory brainstem response (eABR) recording was performed in 7 MED-EL BiCI subjects so far. These BiCI subjects were directly stimulated at 60% dynamic range with 19.9 pulses per second via a research platform provided by the University of Innsbruck (RIB II). The BIC was derived for several interaural electrode pairs by subtracting the response from binaural stimulation from their summed monaural responses. The BIC based pairing results are compared with two psychoacoustic pairing methods: interaural pulse time difference sensitivity and interaural pitch matching. The results for all three methods analyzed as a function of probe electrode allow for determining a matched pair in more than half of the subjects, with a typical accuracy of ±1 electrode. This includes evidence for statistically significant tuning of the BIC as a function of probe electrode in human subjects. However, results across the three conditions were sometimes not consistent. These discrepancies will be discussed in the light of pitch plasticity versus less plastic brainstem processing.

In binaural loudness summation, diotic presentation of a sound usually produces greater loudness than monaural presentation. However, experiments using loudspeaker presentation with and without earplugs find that magnitude estimates of loudness are little altered by the earplug, suggesting a form of loudness constancy. We explored the significance of controlling stimulation of the second ear using meatal occlusion as opposed to the deactivation of one earphone. We measured the point of subjective loudness equality (PSLE) for monaural vs. binaural presentation using an adaptive technique for both speech and noise. These stimuli were presented in a reverberant room over a loudspeaker to the right of the listener, or over lightweight headphones. Using the headphones, stimuli were either presented dry, or matched to those of the loudspeaker by convolution with impulse responses measured from the loudspeaker to the listener position, using an acoustic manikin. The headphone response was also compensated. Using the loudspeaker, monaural presentation was achieved by instructing the listener to block the left ear with a finger. Near perfect binaural loudness constancy was observed using loudspeaker presentation, while there was a summation effect of 3–6 dB for both headphone conditions. However, only partial constancy was observed when meatal occlusion was simulated. These results suggest that there may be contributions to binaural loudness constancy from residual low frequencies at the occluded ear as well as a cognitive element, which is activated by the knowledge that one ear is occluded.

Speech intelligibility in multitalker settings improves when the target speaker is spatially separated from the interfering speakers. A factor that may contribute to this improvement is the improved detectability of target-speech components due to binaural interaction in analogy to the Binaural Masking Level Difference (BMLD). This would allow listeners to hear target speech components within specific time-frequency intervals that have a negative SNR, similar to the improvement in the detectability of a tone in noise when these contain disparate interaural difference cues. To investigate whether these negative-SNR target-speech components indeed contribute to speech intelligibility, a stimulus manipulation was performed where all target components were removed when local SNRs were smaller than a certain criterion value. It can be expected that for sufficiently high criterion values target speech components will be removed that do contribute to speech intelligibility. For spatially separated speakers, assuming that a BMLD-like detection advantage contributes to intelligibility, degradation in intelligibility is expected already at criterion values below 0 dB SNR. However, for collocated speakers it is expected that higher criterion values can be applied without impairing speech intelligibility. Results show that degradation of intelligibility for separated speakers is only seen for criterion values of 0 dB and above, indicating a negligible contribution of a BMLD-like detection advantage in multitalker settings. These results show that the spatial benefit is related to a spatial separation of speech components at positive local SNRs rather than to a BMLD-like detection improvement for speech components at negative local SNRs.