Phonetic perception but not perception of speaker gender is impaired in chronic tinnitus

Abstract

While tinnitus is known to compromise the perception of speech, it is unclear if the same holds for extralinguistic speaker information. Furthermore, research with simple tone stimuli showed that unilateral tinnitus binds spatial attention, thereby impeding the detection of auditory changes in the non-affected ear. Using dichotic listening tasks, we tested left-ear tinnitus patients and control patients for their ability to ignore speech and speaker information in the task-irrelevant ear. To this end they heard vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) syllables simultaneously spoken by gender-ambiguous voices in one ear and male or female voices in the contralateral ear. They selectively attended to speech (Exp. 1) or speaker (Exp. 2) information in a designated target ear, by classifying either the consonant (/b/ or /g/) in VCV syllables or voice gender (male or female) while ignoring distractor voices in the other ear. While performance was comparable across groups in the gender task, tinnitus patients responded slower than controls in the consonant task, with no effect of target ear. This suggests that tinnitus hampers phonetic perception in speech, while preserving the processing of extralinguistic speaker information. These findings support the growing evidence for speech perception impairments in tinnitus.

Keywords: Dichotic listening; Executive attention; Speaker gender; Speech; Tinnitus; Voice perception.