EEG activity evoked in preparation for multi-talker listening by adults and children

Holmes, Emma; Kitterick, P�draig T.; Summerfield, A. Quentin

Abstract

Selective attention is critical for successful speech perception because speech is often encountered in the presence of other sounds, including the voices of competing talkers. Faced with the need to attend selectively, listeners perceive speech more accurately when they know characteristics of upcoming talkers before they begin to speak. However, the neural processes that underlie the preparation of selective attention for voices are not fully understood. The current experiments used electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate the time course of brain activity during preparation for an upcoming talker in young adults aged 18-27 years with normal hearing (Experiments 1 and 2) and in typically-developing children aged 7-13 years (Experiment 3). Participants reported key words spoken by a target talker when an opposite-gender distractor talker spoke simultaneously. The two talkers were presented from different spatial locations (±30° azimuth). Before the talkers began to speak, a visual cue indicated either the location (left/right) or the gender (male/female) of the target talker. Adults evoked preparatory EEG activity that started shortly after (

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Apr 28, 2016
• Online Publication Date: May 10, 2016
• Deposit Date: Oct 26, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 26, 2016
• Journal: Hearing Research
• Print ISSN: 0378-5955
• Electronic ISSN: 1878-5891
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 336
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heares.2016.04.007
• Keywords: speech recognition, multi-tasker listening, auditory, attention, EEG
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/790550
• Publisher URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378595516300594