Hearing responses and speech perception diverged with age
In an observational study of adults, electrical responses to high-frequency sounds were reduced without a matching loss in speech-sound discrimination.
Limit: Electrical responses were recorded only in quiet, not in noise
Edited by Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
Adults of different ages, including people with hearing impairment, took part in an observational study. Researchers used scalp electrodes to record electrical responses to tones and speech-like sounds in quiet. They tested speech-sound discrimination in quiet and with noise in either ear.
Responses to rhythmically changing tones weakened gradually with age, consistent with emerging damage to connections between inner-ear sensory cells and nerves. Responses to changes in the strength of high-frequency sounds were most reduced in older hearing-impaired adults with combined damage to these connections and outer hair cells, sensory cells in the inner ear. Responses to such changes in low-frequency sounds remained preserved. Discrimination relying mainly on fine timing within sounds worsened with outer hair cell damage in quiet and with age when noise entered the opposite ear. Discrimination relying mainly on changes in sound strength showed no significant age effect.
Why it matters
The authors suggested that combining electrical recordings with listening tests might help detect subtle hearing deficits and support earlier diagnosis of age-related hearing loss.
Caveats
The observational design cannot establish what caused these differences. Electrical responses were recorded only in quiet, limiting conclusions about sound encoding in noise.
- Noise
- Hearing impairment
- Age-related hearing loss
- Cochlear synaptopathy
- High-frequency TENV-based EFR magnitude
- Humans
The paper
Peripheral phoneme encoding and discrimination in aging and hearing impairment
Ghent University
Hearing Research, Jul 18, 2026, Open access, accepted manuscript
