Multi-talker speech comprehension at different temporal scales in listeners with normal and impaired hearing

Comprehending speech requires deciphering a range of linguistic representations, from phonemes to narratives. Prior research suggests that in single-talker scenarios, the neural encoding of linguistic units follows a hierarchy of increasing temporal receptive windows. Shorter temporal units like phonemes and syllables are encoded by lower-level sensory brain regions, whereas longer units such as sentences and paragraphs are processed by higher-level perceptual and cognitive areas. However, the brain’s representation of these linguistic units under challenging listening conditions, such as a cocktail party situation, remains unclear. In this study, we recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) responses from both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired participants as they listened to individual and dual speakers narrating different parts of a story. The inclusion of hearing-impaired listeners allowed us to examine how hierarchically organized linguistic units in competing speech streams affect comprehension abilities. We leveraged a hierarchical language model to extract linguistic information at multiple levels—phoneme, syllable, word, phrase, and sentence—and aligned these model activations with the EEG data. Our findings showed distinct neural responses to dual-speaker speech between the two groups. Specifically, compared to normal-hearing listeners, hearing-impaired listeners exhibited poorer model fits at the acoustic, phoneme, and syllable levels, as well as the sentence levels, but not at the word and phrase levels. These results suggest that hearing-impaired listeners experience disruptions at both shorter and longer temporal scales, while their processing at medium temporal scales remains unaffected.