{"doi":"10.7554/elife.51419","title":"Bottom-up and top-down neural signatures of disordered multi-talker speech perception in adults with normal hearing","abstract":"In social settings, speech waveforms from nearby speakers mix together in our ear canals. Normally, the brain unmixes the attended speech stream from the chorus of background speakers using a combination of fast temporal processing and cognitive active listening mechanisms. Of >100,000 patient records,~10% of adults visited our clinic because of reduced hearing, only to learn that their hearing was clinically normal and should not cause communication difficulties. We found that multi-talker speech intelligibility thresholds varied widely in normal hearing adults, but could be predicted from neural phase-locking to frequency modulation (FM) cues measured with ear canal EEG recordings. Combining neural temporal fine structure processing, pupil-indexed listening effort, and behavioral FM thresholds accounted for 78% of the variability in multi-talker speech intelligibility. The disordered bottom-up and top-down markers of poor multi-talker speech perception identified here could inform the design of next-generation clinical tests for hidden hearing disorders.","journal":"eLife","year":2020,"id":53335,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":118,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9465,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":271744,"name":"Kenneth E. Hancock","orcid":"0000-0002-5629-498X","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":271745,"name":"Kara Bennett","orcid":"0000-0002-9465-8983","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":271746,"name":"Victor DeGruttola","orcid":"0000-0003-2772-6242","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":271747,"name":"Daniel B. Polley","orcid":"0000-0002-5120-2409","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":271743,"name":"Aravindakshan Parthasarathy","orcid":"0000-0002-4573-8004","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":122,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T20:44:25.349797Z","pmid":"31961322","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}