Peripheral phoneme encoding and discrimination in aging and hearing impairment

Peripheral phoneme encoding and discrimination in aging and hearing impairment | bioRxiv Skip to main content Home About Submit ALERTS / RSS Search for this keyword Advanced Search New Results Peripheral phoneme encoding and discrimination in aging and hearing impairment View ORCID Profile Marjoleen Wouters , Etienne Gaudrain , Konrad Dapper , Jakob Schirmer , Deniz Başkent , Lukas Rüttiger , Marlies Knipper , Sarah Verhulst doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.01.27.702044 Marjoleen Wouters a Hearing Technology at Wireless, Acoustics, Environment and Expert Systems, Department of Information Technology, Ghent University , Technologiepark 126, 9052, Zwijnaarde, Belgium Find this author on Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for this author on this site ORCID record for Marjoleen Wouters For correspondence: marjoleen.wouters{at}ugent.be Etienne Gaudrain b Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 , CNRS UMR5292, INSERM U1028, Center Hospitalier Le Vinatier-Bâtiment 462-Neurocampus , Boulevard Pinel 95, 69675 Bron CEDEX, Lyon, France Find this author on Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for this author on this site Konrad Dapper c Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck, University of Tübingen , Elfriede-Aulhorn-Str. 5, 72076, Tübingen, Germany Find this author on Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for this author on this site Jakob Schirmer c Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck, University of Tübingen , Elfriede-Aulhorn-Str. 5, 72076, Tübingen, Germany Find this author on Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for this author on this site Deniz Başkent d Department of Otorhinolaryngology, University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG), University of Groningen , Hanzeplein 1, BB21, 9700, Groningen, the Netherlands Find this author on Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for this author on this site Lukas Rüttiger c Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck, University of Tübingen , Elfriede-Aulhorn-Str. 5, 72076, Tübingen, Germany Find this author on Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for this author on this site Marlies Knipper c Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck, University of Tübingen , Elfriede-Aulhorn-Str. 5, 72076, Tübingen, Germany Find this author on Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for this author on this site Sarah Verhulst a Hearing Technology at Wireless, Acoustics, Environment and Expert Systems, Department of Information Technology, Ghent University , Technologiepark 126, 9052, Zwijnaarde, Belgium Find this author on Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for this author on this site Abstract Full Text Info/History Metrics Preview PDF Abstract Highlights Speech EEG shows age- and OHC-related vulnerability of high-CF envelope coding. Speech EEG shows low-CF envelope encoding stays intact with age. Fine-structure contrast discrimination worsens with OHC loss in quiet. Fine-structure contrast discrimination worsens with age in contralateral noise. Phoneme discrimination involving high-frequency contrasts remains robust with age. Peripheral coding strength is not directly reflected at behavioral level. Speech perception difficulties in noise are common among older adults and individuals with hearing impairment, but also occur among younger adults whose audiometric thresholds are within the clinically-normal range. We examined how aging, cochlear synaptopathy (CS), and outer hair cell (OHC) damage affect speech encoding and phoneme discrimination. Envelope-following responses (EFRs) to rectangular amplitude-modulated (RAM) tones and speech-like phoneme pairs were recorded in quiet using EEG, and behavioral discrimination was assessed in quiet, and with ipsilateral and contralateral noise. Stimuli were designed to target temporal envelope (TENV) or temporal fine structure (TFS) encoding. Results showed that RAM-EFR amplitudes decreased gradually with increasing age, consistent with emerging CS, while magnitudes of high-frequency TENV-based EFRs in quiet were most reduced in older hearing-impaired subjects with combined CS and OHC damage. In contrast, EFRs targeting low-frequency TENV encoding in quiet remained preserved. Behaviorally, discrimination of predominantly TFS-based phoneme contrasts worsened with OHC loss and age in quiet and contralateral noise, respectively, whereas discrimination of predominantly TENV-based contrasts showed no significant age effect. Considering that high-frequency contrasts are discriminated via place-based spectral cues, low-frequency contrasts rely on TFS, and the EFR reflects primarily TENV, this framework explains why EFRs decline for high-frequency cues without perceptual loss, while EFRs remain stable for low-frequency cues even as TFS-based discrimination deteriorates. These findings highlight the need to investigate how neural coding deficits relate to perception. Combining electrophysiological and behavioral measures might provide a framework for detecting subclinical auditory deficits to earlier diagnose age-related and hidden hearing loss. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Footnotes Clarification on chosen phase-locking limit and psychoacoustic outcomes. Funder Information Declared Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, https://ror.org/018mejw64 , DFG 890 KN 316/13-1 , DFG RU 713/6-1 , KL 1093/12-1 ERA-NET NEURON JTC 2020 , BMBF 01EW2102 CoSySpeech Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek , G0H6420N IZKF Promotionskolleg of the Faculty of Medicine Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw) , VICI 893 Grant (Grant No. 918-17-603) Copyright The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license . Back to top Previous Next Posted July 11, 2026. Download PDF Email Thank you for your interest in spreading the word about bioRxiv. NOTE: Your email address is requested solely to identify you as the sender of this article. 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Share Peripheral phoneme encoding and discrimination in aging and hearing impairment Marjoleen Wouters , Etienne Gaudrain , Konrad Dapper , Jakob Schirmer , Deniz Başkent , Lukas Rüttiger , Marlies Knipper , Sarah Verhulst bioRxiv 2026.01.27.702044; doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.01.27.702044 Share This Article: Copy Citation Tools Peripheral phoneme encoding and discrimination in aging and hearing impairment Marjoleen Wouters , Etienne Gaudrain , Konrad Dapper , Jakob Schirmer , Deniz Başkent , Lukas Rüttiger , Marlies Knipper , Sarah Verhulst bioRxiv 2026.01.27.702044; doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.01.27.702044 Citation Manager Formats BibTeX Bookends EasyBib EndNote (tagged) EndNote 8 (xml) Medlars Mendeley Papers RefWorks Tagged Ref Manager RIS Zotero Tweet Widget Facebook Like Google Plus One Subject Area Neuroscience Subject Areas All Articles Animal Behavior and Cognition (8164) Biochemistry (19027) Bioengineering (15171) Bioinformatics (45807) Biophysics (22958) Cancer Biology (20247) Cell Biology (27493) Clinical Trials (138) Developmental Biology (14233) Ecology (21529) Epidemiology (2067) Evolutionary Biology (25940) Genetics (16436) Genomics (23978) Immunology (19175) Microbiology (43481) Molecular Biology (18481) Neuroscience (95833) Paleontology (717) Pathology (3064) Pharmacology and Toxicology (5253) Physiology (8339) Plant Biology (16378) Scientific Communication and Education (2123) Synthetic Biology (4675) Systems Biology (10449) Zoology (2436)

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