Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Amsterdam UMC location Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Amsterdam Public Health Research Institute, the Netherlands.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2024 Nov 7;67(11):4549-4566. doi: 10.1044/2024_JSLHR-24-00017. Epub 2024 Oct 11.
A relevant aspect of listening is the effort required during speech processing, which can be assessed by pupillometry. Here, we assessed the pupil dilation response of normal-hearing (NH) and hard of hearing (HH) individuals during listening to clear sentences and masked or degraded sentences. We combined this assessment with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of the pupil dilation response.
Seventeen NH participants ( = 46 years) were compared to 17 HH participants ( = 45 years) who were individually matched in age and educational level. Participants repeated sentences that were presented clearly, that were distorted, or that were masked. The sentence intelligibility level of masked and distorted sentences was 50% correct. Silent baseline trials were presented as well. Performance measures, pupil dilation responses, and fMRI data were acquired.
HH individuals had overall poorer speech reception than the NH participants, but not for noise-vocoded speech. In addition, an interaction effect was observed with smaller pupil dilation responses in HH than in NH listeners for the degraded speech conditions. Hearing impairment was associated with higher activation across conditions in the left superior temporal gyrus, as compared to the silent baseline. However, the region of interest analysis indicated lower activation during degraded speech relative to clear speech in bilateral frontal regions and the insular cortex, for HH compared to NH listeners. Hearing impairment was also associated with a weaker relation between the pupil response and activation in the right inferior frontal gyrus. Overall, degraded speech evoked higher frontal activation than clear speech.
Brain areas associated with attentional and cognitive-control processes may be increasingly recruited when speech is degraded and are related to the pupil dilation response, but this relationship is weaker in HH listeners.
听力的一个相关方面是言语处理过程中所需的努力，这可以通过瞳孔测量来评估。在这里，我们评估了正常听力 (NH) 和听力障碍 (HH) 个体在听清晰句子和掩蔽或降级句子时的瞳孔扩张反应。我们将这种评估与功能磁共振成像 (fMRI) 相结合，以研究瞳孔扩张反应的神经相关性。
将 17 名 NH 参与者（ = 46 岁）与 17 名 HH 参与者（ = 45 岁）进行比较，这些参与者在年龄和教育程度上均匹配。参与者重复清晰呈现、失真或掩蔽的句子。掩蔽和失真句子的句子可懂度水平为 50%正确。还呈现了无声的基线试验。获取了表现指标、瞳孔扩张反应和 fMRI 数据。
HH 个体的言语接受能力总体上比 NH 参与者差，但对噪声编码语音则不然。此外，观察到一种交互效应，即与 NH 听众相比，HH 听众在降级语音条件下的瞳孔扩张反应较小。与安静的基线相比，与听力障碍相关的是左颞上回的激活程度更高。然而，感兴趣区域分析表明，与 NH 听众相比，HH 听众在双侧额区和岛叶皮质中，在降级语音条件下的激活低于清晰语音。听力障碍也与右额下回的瞳孔反应与激活之间的相关性较弱有关。总体而言，与清晰语音相比，降级语音会引起更高的额部激活。
当语音受损时，与注意力和认知控制过程相关的大脑区域可能会被更多地招募，并且与瞳孔扩张反应相关，但这种关系在 HH 听众中较弱。
