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J Am Acad Audiol 2001; 12(10): 523-533
DOI: 10.1055/s-0042-1745643
Original Article

Human Frequency-Following Responses: Representation of Second Formant Transitions in Normal-Hearing and Hearing-Impaired Listeners

Patrick N. Plyler
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
,
A.K. Ananthanarayan
Department of Audiology and Speech Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
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Abstract

Auditory nerve single-unit studies have demonstrated that phase-locking plays an important role in the neural encoding of the spectrum of speech-like sounds. Recently, it has been reported that the phase-locked activity underlying the scalp-recorded human frequencyfollowing response (FFR) also encodes the first two formants of several steady-state vowels and the time-variant frequency presented in tonal sweeps. The purpose of this study was to determine (1) if FFR can encode the time-varying second formant transitions in synthetic stop consonant stimuli in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners, (2) if hearing-impairment causes degradation of this neural representation, and (3) if the degraded representation is correlated with reduced consonant identification in hearing-impaired listeners. FFRs were obtained from normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners in response to several synthetic stop consonants. The results demonstrated that the FFR did encode the second formant transition in normal-hearing listeners. However, FFR encoding was severely degraded in most of the hearing-impaired listeners. Further, comparison of identification and FFR data for individual hearing-impaired listeners appears to suggest that degradation in the neural representation of the second formant transition may be accompanied by reduction in identification performance.

Abbreviations: FFR = frequency-following response

Keywords

Neural phase-locking - second formant transition


Publikationsverlauf

Artikel online veröffentlicht:
07. März 2022

© 2001. American Academy of Audiology. This article is published by Thieme.

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