Speech perception in MRI scanner noise by persons with aphasia

Area of Science:

• Auditory Neuroscience
• Neuroimaging
• Speech and Hearing Sciences

Background:

• Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) produces significant acoustic noise.
• This noise may impact cognitive task performance, particularly auditory tasks.
• Understanding the effects on individuals with and without aphasia is crucial for data interpretation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the impact of MRI scanner noise on auditory task performance in individuals with aphasia (PWA) and neurologically intact controls.
• To determine if PWA are more susceptible to performance reductions caused by scanner noise compared to controls.

Main Methods:

• Developed four auditory tasks varying in linguistic complexity: pitch discrimination, syllable discrimination, lexical decision, and sentence plausibility.
• Administered tasks to PWA and control groups under silent conditions and during MRI scanner noise at three signal-to-noise (S/N) ratios.
• Measured performance decrements as a function of decreasing S/N.

Main Results:

• Overall, PWA performed lower than controls across all tasks.
• Auditory task performance decreased significantly with lower signal-to-noise ratios (S/N).
• The rate of performance decline due to noise was comparable between PWA and control groups.

Conclusions:

• Intense MRI scanner noise can significantly impair auditory task performance, dependent on signal and noise levels.
• Individuals with aphasia exhibit similar susceptibility to scanner noise-induced performance decline as unimpaired individuals.
• Functional MRI data from both aphasic and control groups can be reliably interpreted, as scanner noise does not disproportionately affect PWA.