Tinnitus selectively disrupts phoneme level speech perception

Chronic subjective tinnitus has been linked to impaired speech-in-noise perception, yet its impact on phoneme level processing remains unclear. We assessed phoneme discrimination in 49 normal hearing participants (26 with chronic subjective tinnitus and 23 matched controls), with matched audiometric thresholds and supra-threshold processing, and found no statistically significant differences between groups on the...

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Audiologists should consider assessing phoneme-level speech-in-noise discrimination in patients with chronic tinnitus even when standard audiograms are normal, as tinnitus may selectively impair this ability beyond what pure-tone thresholds reveal.

If tinnitus independently disrupts phoneme discrimination in clinically normal-hearing individuals, speech-in-noise testing should become a standard component of tinnitus assessment — expanding the scope of audiological evaluation for this population.

1. 0149 normal-hearing adults with chronic subjective tinnitus were assessed for phoneme discrimination.
2. 02Tinnitus was associated with selective disruption of phoneme-level speech perception in noise.
3. 03Standard audiometric thresholds were normal, suggesting the effect is not explained by peripheral hearing loss.
4. 04Findings suggest a central auditory or cognitive processing component to tinnitus-related speech difficulty.
5. 05Results support expanding speech-in-noise testing in clinical tinnitus evaluations.

PMID

42775921

DOI

10.1121/10.0046671.

Journal

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Publication type

research_article

Evidence level

3

Sample size

49

Population

Adults with normal audiometric thresholds and chronic subjective tinnitus

Intervention

Phoneme discrimination task in noise in chronic tinnitus sufferers

Comparator

Normal-hearing adults without tinnitus (implied control group)