Conclusions

Older adults often report that during a conversation they can hear what is said, but cannot understand the meaning, particularly in a noisy environment. These difficulties may arise from deficits in auditory temporal processing [1]. Recent results using magnetoencephalography (MEG) [2,3] have shown the feasibility of reconstructing the envelope of speech in noisy conditions by using low frequency oscillations of the brain in younger adults. Although the effects of neural speech processing has been investigated in quiet conditions [4], little is known about how noise impacts cortical speech processing in younger vs. older adults. Here, we compared the effects of noise on cortical responses in younger and older adults with normal hearing, hypothesizing that in favorable conditions (SNR 0 dB) differences in performance between the two age groups will be mainly linked to the fact that younger adults are better than older adults at suppressing the competing speech signal