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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Neurosci.
Sec. Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1497781

P300 as an index of speech-in-noise understanding in complex acoustic environments in young and older adults

Provisionally accepted
Dylan V. Pearson Dylan V. Pearson 1,2*Yi Shen Yi Shen 3William Hetrick William Hetrick 2Brian O'donnell Brian O'donnell 2Nancy Lundin Nancy Lundin 4J. Devin Mcauley J. Devin Mcauley 5Gary R Kidd Gary R Kidd 2
  • 1 University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, United States
  • 2 Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States
  • 3 University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States
  • 4 The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States
  • 5 Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, United States

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

    Aging is associated with decrements in speech-in-noise perception which make communication in real world environments difficult. However, the neural correlates of these difficulties are not well characterized and finding correlations between speech-in-noise performance and electrophysiological measures has been difficult due in part to the fact that speech-in-noise perception is a multi-faceted process. The current study elicited P300 event related brain responses in young and older adult listeners to spoken isochronous syllable sequences presented in quiet and noisy (i.e., multi-talker babble) background conditions. In order to investigate the extent to which P300 responses are associated with speech-in-noise understanding, listeners also completed a separate battery of speech-in-noise recognition tasks. Results indicated that older adults had P300 responses to deviant and omitted speech stimuli with lower amplitudes, longer latencies, and relatively greater frontal topographies than young adults. Overall, P300 amplitudes measured in noisy conditions, but not in quiet conditions, were associated with performance on a variety of speech recognition tasks and were positively correlated with a composite measure of speech understanding in noise based on the full battery. The results highlight the relevance of neural attentional mechanisms for understanding age-related differences in speech understanding in noise.

    Keywords: speech rhythm, Aging, P300, Speech-in-noise (SIN) perception, Speech entrainment

    Received: 17 Sep 2024; Accepted: 06 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Pearson, Shen, Hetrick, O'donnell, Lundin, Mcauley and Kidd. 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: Dylan V. Pearson, University of Central Florida, Orlando, 32816, Florida, United States

    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.