Research articleElderly listeners with low intelligibility scores under reverberation show degraded subcortical representation of reverberant speech

- Auditory brainstem responses to anechoic and reverberant speech sounds were obtained from 28 elderly listeners (>62 y).
- Listeners with low word intelligibility of reverberant speech showed degraded encoding information of reverberant speech.
- The findings provide initial evidence of subcortical processing deficits in elderly listeners with difficulty in understanding reverberant speech.

In order to elucidate why many elderly listeners have difficulty understanding speech under reverberation, we investigated the relationship between word intelligibility and auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) in 28 elderly listeners. We hypothesized that the elderly listeners with low word intelligibility scores under reverberation would show degraded subcortical encoding information of reverberant speech as expressed in their ABRs towards a reverberant /da/ syllable. The participants were divided into two groups (top and bottom performance groups) according to their word intelligibility scores for anechoic and reverberant words, and ABR characteristics between groups were compared. We found that correlation coefficients between responses to anechoic and reverberant /da/ were lower in the bottom performance group than in the top performance group. This result suggests that degraded neural representation toward information of reverberant speech may account for lower intelligibility of reverberant speech in elderly listeners.