Compensational strategies in difficult hearing environments - how the brain adapts when hearing becomes tricky: a mismatch-negativity-study in ci-users with good and bad speech performance
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1
Institut für Biomagnetismus und Biosignalanalyse, Germany
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2
Klinik für Phoniatrie und Pädaudiologie, Universitätsklinikum Münster, Germany
In this study, prelingually deafened Cochlear-Implant-users (7-19 years), were tested in easy and difficult hearing situations, using an odd-ball-paradigm. After applying extensive logopedic tests that evaluated speech perception and speech production, we identified very good and very bad performers and chose 9 matched pairs that equaled each other in hearing age, implantation date and very good hearing abilities (according to clinical standard tests). Each patient was then additionally tested with a very basic phoneme discrimination task to find each person’s most difficult (e.g. Bu vs. Bo) and easiest (e.g. Bu vs. Ba) subtest. The resulting phoneme pairs were then used for EEG measurement. Although all patients had very good hearing abilities, good performers showed a significant better performance in phoneme discrimination tests than bad performers. This result was confirmed in EEG for the easy subtest, revealing higher amplitudes in Mismatch Negativity in left frontal brain areas compared to bad performers. Additionally, these activations correlated positive with each patient’s working memory performance and subjective rating of his or her personal hearing ability. Most interestingly, for the difficult discrimination task neither the good, nor the bad performers showed a Mismatch Negativity (MMN) in frontal areas. Instead, both groups showed significant higher activations for the deviants compared to the standards in occipitoparietal brain areas. This can be interpreted as a compensatory strategy to more easily understand difficult auditory input: occipital brain areas are here hypothesized to encode additional visual information as e.g. offered in lip reading, whereas parietal activations are probably recruiting additional attentional resources.
Keywords:
EEG,
Perception
Conference:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Sessions: Neurophysiology of Sensation and Perception
Citation:
Ortmann
M,
Knief
A,
Deuster
D,
Zehnhoff-Dinneses
A and
Dobel
C
(2011). Compensational strategies in difficult hearing environments - how the brain adapts when hearing becomes tricky: a mismatch-negativity-study in ci-users with good and bad speech performance.
Conference Abstract:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00339
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Received:
23 Nov 2011;
Published Online:
28 Nov 2011.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Magdalene Ortmann, Institut für Biomagnetismus und Biosignalanalyse, Münster, Germany, leniortmann@googlemail.com