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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Neurosci.
Sec. Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience
Volume 18 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fnins.2024.1415397

Novel bias-reduced coherence measure for EEG-based speech tracking in listeners with hearing impairment

Provisionally accepted
Oskar Keding Oskar Keding 1,2*Emina Alickovic Emina Alickovic 3,4Martin A. Skoglund Martin A. Skoglund 3,4Maria Sandsten Maria Sandsten 1
  • 1 Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
  • 2 Lund University, Lund, Sweden
  • 3 Eriksholm Research Centre, Snekkersten, Denmark
  • 4 Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Linköping University, Linköping, Östergötland, Sweden

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    In the literature, auditory attention is explored through neural speech tracking, primarily entailing modeling and analyzing electroencephalography (EEG) responses to natural speech via linear filtering. Our study takes a novel approach, introducing an enhanced coherence estimation technique to assess the strength of neural speech tracking. This enables effective discrimination between attended and ignored speech. To mitigate the impact of colored noise in EEG, we address two biases -overall coherence-level bias and spectral peak-shifting bias.In a listening study involving 32 participants with hearing impairment, tasked with attending to competing talkers in background noise, our coherence-based method effectively discerns EEG representations of attended and ignored speech. We comprehensively analyze frequency bands, individual frequencies, and EEG channels. Frequency bands of importance are shown to be delta, theta and alpha, and the important EEG channels are the central. Lastly, we showcase coherence differences across different noise reduction settings implemented in hearing aids (HAs), underscoring our method's potential to objectively assess auditory attention and enhance HA efficacy.

    Keywords: coherence, EEG, Neural speech tracking, Auditory Attention, Multitapers, hearing impairment

    Received: 10 Apr 2024; Accepted: 16 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Keding, Alickovic, Skoglund and Sandsten. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Oskar Keding, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.