Sensitivity to spectrotemporal modulation (STM) has been shown to correlate with speech understanding abilities across individuals with varying degrees of hearing impairment. However, whether speech understanding abilities can be improved through enhanced STM encoding has not been well established. Recent work has shown that STM training may hold promise for improving speech understanding in noise, which supports the hypothesis that STM is a basic feature central to speech perception. The current work further explores this possibility through a large-scale double-blind controlled study on STM training in participants varying in age and hearing sensitivity. Participants complete 30 gamified or non-gamified training sessions in which they discriminate the direction of STM modulation (upwards or downwards) of a brief narrow-band ripple centered around one of five frequencies (0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, or 3 kHz). Speech understanding abilities are measured at pre-, mid-, and post-training points to assess training effects. In addition, individual factors such as age, hearing sensitivity, cognition, and suprathreshold central auditory processing abilities will be used to explore potential mediators and moderators of training effects. All training and assessments were completed in PART. Results have important implications for the use of STM sensitivity as a basis function for speech understanding.
Gallun et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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