Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Neural Encoding Of Complex Signals In The Healthy And Impaired Auditory Systems, Saradha Ananthakrishnan

Open Access Dissertations

Individuals with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) typically experience difficulty in understanding speech. Our current knowledge of deficits in speech perception and encoding consequent to SNHL is restricted to psychophysical studies in humans and single-unit experiments in animals. However, the nature of degradation in neural encoding of speech following hearing impairment in humans has not been extensively researched. The objective of this dissertation is to provide a systematic evaluation of neurobiological signature of hearing loss at the subcortical level using an objective electrophysiological non-invasive neural index, the frequency following response (FFR). Subcortical neural encoding of speech signals is explored by quantifying …