Simon, Ding, Chatterjee publish paper in NeuroImage

A paper by Associate Professor Jonathan Simon (ECE/Biology/ISR), his former advisee, Dr. Nai Ding, and Monita Chatterjee of Boys Town National Research Hospital in Omaha, Neb., has been published in the March 2014 issue of the prestigious journal NeuroImage. Nai Ding is currently a postdoctoral researcher at New York University.

“Robust Cortical Entrainment to the Speech Envelope Relies on the Spectro-Temporal Fine Structure” examines how brains extract and process speech when the speech is acoustically disrupted by noise, and even more interestingly, in cases as it would be heard by a cochlear implant user.

The researchers found as long as there is no surrounding noise the brain can cleanly extract the speech even as heard through a cochlear implant. However, even moderate noise severely disrupts the brain’s ability to extract the speech under cochlear implant listening conditions.

The neural processing measured in this research (in human listeners who were scanned with magnetoencephalography) is in complete agreement with the everyday listening experiences of cochlear implant users in noisy conditions, where they can hear when someone is talking but cannot understand what they are saying.

Published February 1, 2014