Department of Otology and Skull Base Surgery, Eye Ear Nose and Throat Hospital, NHC Key Laboratory of Hearing Medicine, Fudan University, 83 Fenyang Road, Shanghai, 200031, China.
House Ear Institute, 2100 West Third Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90057, USA.
Sci Rep. 2020 Nov 16;10(1):19851. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-76942-1.
Many tinnitus patients report difficulties understanding speech in noise or competing talkers, despite having "normal" hearing in terms of audiometric thresholds. The interference caused by tinnitus is more likely central in origin. Release from informational masking (more central in origin) produced by competing speech may further illuminate central interference due to tinnitus. In the present study, masked speech understanding was measured in normal hearing listeners with or without tinnitus. Speech recognition thresholds were measured for target speech in the presence of multi-talker babble or competing speech. For competing speech, speech recognition thresholds were measured for different cue conditions (i.e., with and without target-masker sex differences and/or with and without spatial cues). The present data suggest that tinnitus negatively affected masked speech recognition even in individuals with no measurable hearing loss. Tinnitus severity appeared to especially limit listeners' ability to segregate competing speech using talker sex differences. The data suggest that increased informational masking via lexical interference may tax tinnitus patients' central auditory processing resources.
许多耳鸣患者报告说，尽管在听力阈值方面“正常”，但他们在噪声或竞争说话者中理解言语存在困难。耳鸣引起的干扰更可能是中枢起源的。竞争言语产生的信息掩蔽（更可能是中枢起源的）的释放可能会进一步阐明由于耳鸣引起的中枢干扰。在本研究中，测量了有或没有耳鸣的正常听力听众的掩蔽言语理解。在多说话者背景噪声或竞争言语存在的情况下，测量了目标言语的语音识别阈值。对于竞争言语，测量了不同提示条件下的语音识别阈值（即，有无目标-掩蔽者性别差异，以及有无空间提示）。目前的数据表明，耳鸣即使在没有可测量听力损失的个体中也会对掩蔽言语识别产生负面影响。耳鸣严重程度似乎特别限制了听众使用说话者性别差异来区分竞争言语的能力。数据表明，通过词汇干扰增加信息掩蔽可能会消耗耳鸣患者的中枢听觉处理资源。
