CANCELLED: Objective Evaluation of Cortical Speech Processing During Everyday Tasks Seminar

Currently, there is much interest in finding objective methods to evaluate how well a subject is hearing and understanding speech. These objective methods often involve measuring cortical brain activity to speech using electroencephalography (EEG). Using these responses would allow evaluation of hearing function to ecologically relevant speech stimuli without the need for obtaining a behavioural response from the subject. It could thus find applications in evaluating hearing function in populations who are unable or unwilling to provide such behavioural responses (e.g. infants). Using objective responses to speech stimuli could also improve hearing aid fitting evaluation, as hearing aid technologies often include speech-processing algorithms and might therefore process usual stimuli such as tones differently. Moreover, real-time objective assessment of speech understanding might find applications in hearing aids, allowing the aid to change its settings based on changes in these EEG responses.

Most research in the field has focussed on evaluating responses from subjects with normal hearing thresholds in multi-talker-environments. These studies have shown the possibility to distinguish between EEG responses to the voice subjects are paying attention to from other voices that are not paid attention to while subjects are in rest. However, not much work has been done on evaluating these objective responses in hearing impaired subjects, or while a subject is performing everyday activities. This presentation will discuss some of the early work on evaluating objective responses in mild-to-moderately hearing impaired subjects, and the effect of performing a physical task while listening to speech on these objective responses.