Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-1-2025
Journal / Book Title
Scientific Reports
Abstract
Perceptual benefits from digital noise reduction (NR) vary among individuals with different noise tolerance and sensitivity to distortions introduced in NR-processed speech; however, the physiological bases of the variance are understudied. Here, we developed objective measures of speech encoding in the ascending pathway as candidate measures of individual noise tolerance and sensitivity to NR-processed speech using the brainstem responses to speech syllable /da/. The speech-evoked brainstem response was found to be sensitive to the addition of noise and NR processing. The NR effects on the consonant and vowel portion of the responses were robustly quantified using response-to-response correlation metrics and spectral amplitude ratios, respectively. Further, the f0 amplitude ratios between conditions correlated with behavioral accuracy with NR. These findings suggest that investigating the NR effects on bottom-up speech encoding using brainstem measures is feasible and that individual subcortical encoding of NR-processed speech may relate to individual behavioral outcomes with NR.
DOI
10.1038/s41598-025-07652-9
Rights
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Montclair State University Digital Commons Citation
Kim, Subong; Schroeder, Mary; and Bharadwaj, Hari M., "Effect of digital noise reduction processing on subcortical speech encoding and relationship to behavioral outcomes" (2025). Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works. 181.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/communcsci-disorders-facpubs/181
Published Citation
Kim, S., Schroeder, M., & Bharadwaj, H. M. (2025). Effect of digital noise reduction processing on subcortical speech encoding and relationship to behavioral outcomes. Scientific reports, 15(1), 22198. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-07652-9