Individuals differ vastly in how well they are able to understand speech in challenging listening situations, for example when there is background noise. One explanation for these comprehension differences could be underlying variations in intrinsic brain rhythm patterns. Rhythmic activity at different timescales is ubiquitous in the brain and emerging research suggests that individual differences in these brain rhythms might be able to explain some language-related skills.

In our large population study “Brain Waves for Hearing”, we are systematically testing whether individual variations in peak frequencies and strength of brain rhythms are associated with speech comprehension skills, and how peripheral hearing abilities contribute to this relationship. This study will recruit N = 500 participants from diverse backgrounds to address the bias towards underpowered and unrepresentative WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic) samples in cognitive research. Participants undergo a 10-min resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) recording. This is used to comprehensively model individual intrinsic brain rhythm peaks and amplitudes. Participants also complete a speech comprehension task, in which they verbally repeat sentences that are parametrically modulated with different background noise levels. We hypothesise that the individual amplitude of some intrinsic brain rhythms will be associated with comprehension of noisy speech. This hypothesis is based on a preliminary analysis of a previous dataset, which suggested that a higher individual theta (4-8 Hz) amplitude during rest seemed to be associated with better speech comprehension in noise. I will present first results of our population study.

Apart from contributions to our basic understanding of neural mechanisms of speech comprehension, our results could be used to inform non-invasive brain stimulation approaches to improve speech comprehension, for example with beginning hearing loss.