Anticipatory slow potentials before auditory feedback show posterior predominance but limited condition effects in...

It remains unclear whether noisy listening reliably modulates anticipatory EEG activity before feedback and whether such activity explains interindividual differences in speech-in-noise performance. We examined these questions in an independent cohort of young adults with normal hearing using a time-estimation task with auditory feedback presented in silence and in continuous multi-talker noise. Stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN) was quantified as the mean EEG amplitude in the -200-0 ms interval before feedback onset. The primary analysis used ROI × hemisphere linear mixed-effects models. A response-locked contingent negative variation (CNV) analysis was included as a control. Speech-in-noise performance was summarized descriptively across 0, -5, -10, and -15 dB signal-to-noise ratios, and brain-behavior associations were treated as exploratory. The primary SPN analysis showed a clear posterior predominance, with more negative amplitudes at parietal and occipital than at central and frontal regions. However, the main effect of listening condition was not significant, and neither hemisphere nor the condition × hemisphere interaction reached significance. The CNV control analysis likewise showed no reliable condition effect. Speech-in-noise performance declined monotonically as the signal-to-noise ratio decreased, indicating that the independent behavioral test captured the expected effect of increasing acoustic difficulty across SNR levels. Exploratory analyses did not reveal robust associations between speech-in-noise performance and SPN or CNV measures. These findings indicate that the task elicited anticipatory slow potentials with posterior predominance, but provided limited evidence for reliable modulation by background noise under the present task parameters and sample characteristics.