Influences of noise type and gamification on speech-in-noise performance for those with mild traumatic brain injury

Difficulty hearing speech in noise is a common complaint among patients with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). The cause is not well understood, and effective testing and treatment of this complaint is lacking. The goal of this pilot project was to determine whether noise type or gamification affects speech in noise performance for participants with mTBI history. Participants with and without a history of mTBI completed a gamified version of a speech in noise task. First, participants completed a version with “garbled” speech maskers in which the speech spectra and modulations were preserved but the correlations across spectral bands were perturbed. Next, participants completed a version with traditional speech maskers. A subset of the participants also completed a different gamified version of the task with speech maskers only. While the groups did not perform significantly differently, there was an effect of noise type and gamified test version on performance in the speech-in-noise task. These results indicate the potential utility of gamification and “garbled” speech maskers in assessing speech-in-noise ability. Future directions include collecting a larger sample and comparing with self-report measures to explore whether game or noise type performance are more strongly correlated with reported mTBI symptoms.