P300 as an index of speech-in-noise understanding in complex acoustic environments in young and older adults

Aging is associated with decrements in speech-in-noise perception which make communication in real world environments difficult. However, the neural correlates of these difficulties are not well characterized and finding correlations between speech-in-noise performance and electrophysiological measures has been difficult due in part to the fact that speech-in-noise perception is a multi-faceted process. The current study used a wide range of speech-in-noise tasks in an attempt to more completely capture speech-in-noise performance and compared these with electrophysiological measures.

P300 event related brain responses were elicited in young and older adult listeners to spoken isochronous syllable sequences presented in quiet and noisy (i.e., multi-talker babble) background conditions. To investigate the extent to which P300 responses are associated with speech-in-noise understanding, listeners also completed a separate battery of speech-in-noise recognition tasks.

Overall P300 amplitudes measured in noisy conditions, but not in quiet conditions, were associated with performance on a variety of speech recognition tasks and were positively correlated with a composite measure of speech understanding in noise based on the full battery. In addition, older adults had P300 responses to deviant and omitted speech stimuli with lower amplitudes, longer latencies, and relatively greater frontal topographies than young adults.

The results demonstrate that P300 amplitudes elicited in competing noise were a strong predictor of speech-in-noise understanding. This, in addition to the age-related differences in P300 responses, highlights the relevance of neural attentional mechanisms for understanding age-related differences in speech understanding in noise.