RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Decline of auditory-motor speech processing in older adults with hearing loss
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 169235
DO 10.1101/169235
A1 Muriel TN Panouillères
A1 Riikka Möttönen
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/28/169235.abstract
AB Older adults often experience difficulties in understanding speech in challenging listening conditions, partly because of age-related hearing loss. In young adults, activity of the left articulatory motor cortex is facilitated and the auditory cortex interact with the motor cortex via the left-hemispheric dorsal stream during speech processing. Age and age-related hearing loss are associated with structural, functional and connectivity modifications of the auditory cortex, but it is unknown how they affect the recruitment of the articulatory motor cortex. It has been proposed that the activation of the frontal motor system is enhanced in older adults to compensate for auditory deficits. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of ageing and age-related hearing loss on the excitability of the tongue motor cortex during listening to spoken sentences using transcranial magnetic stimulation and electromyography. Our results show that the excitability of the tongue motor cortex was similarly facilitated during listening to speech in young and older adults with normal hearing, whereas it was reduced in older adults with hearing loss. Speech perception in noise was also impaired in older adults with hearing loss. These findings suggest that auditory-motor processing of speech declines in adults with age-related hearing loss.