Exaggerated Cortical Representation of Speech in Older Listeners: Mutual Information Analysis

Abstract

Aging is associated with an exaggerated representation of the speech envelope in auditory cortex. The relationship between this age-related exaggerated response and a listeners ability to understand speech in noise remains an open question. Here, information-theory-based analysis methods are applied to magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings of human listeners, investigating their cortical responses to continuous speech, using the novel non-linear measure of phase-locked mutual information between the speech stimuli and cortical responses. The cortex of older listeners shows an exaggerated level of mutual information, compared to younger listeners, for both attended and unattended speakers. The mutual information peaks for several distinct latencies: early ([~]50 ms), middle ([~]100 ms) and late ([~]200 ms). For the late component, the neural enhancement of attended over unattended speech is affected by stimulus SNR, but the direction of this dependency is reversed by aging. Critically, in older listeners and for the same late component, greater cortical exaggeration is correlated with decreased behavioral inhibitory control. This negative correlation also carries over to speech intelligibility in noise, where greater cortical exaggeration in older listeners is correlated with worse speech intelligibility scores. Finally, an age-related lateralization difference is also seen for the [~]100 ms latency peaks, where older listeners show a bilateral response compared to younger listeners right-lateralization. Thus, this information-theory-based analysis provides new, and less coarse-grained, results regarding age-related change in auditory cortical speech processing, and its correlation with cognitive measures, compared to related linear measures. New & NoteworthyCortical representations of natural speech are investigated using a novel non-linear approach based on mutual information. Cortical responses, phase-locked to the speech envelope, show an exaggerated level of mutual information associated with aging, appearing at several distinct latencies ([~]50, [~]100 and [~]200 ms). Critically, for older listeners only, the [~]200 ms latency response components are correlated with specific behavioral measures, including behavioral inhibition and speech comprehension.