Abstract：
Speech comprehension in noise depends on complex interactions between peripheral sensory and central cognitive systems. Despite having normal peripheral hearing, older adults show difficulties in speech comprehension. It remains unclear whether the brain\'s neural responses could indicate aging. The current study examined whether individual brain activation during speech perception in different listening environments could predict age. We applied functional near-infrared spectroscopy to 93 normal-hearing human adults (20 to 70 years old) during a sentence listening task, which contained a quiet condition and 4 different signal-to-noise ratios (SNR = 10, 5, 0, -5 dB) noisy conditions. A data-driven approach, the region-based brain-age predictive modeling was adopted. We observed a significant behavioral decrease with age under the 4 noisy conditions, but not under the quiet condition. Brain activations in SNR = 10 dB listening condition could successfully predict individual\'s age. Moreover, we found that the bilateral visual sensory cortex, left dorsal speech pathway, left cerebellum, right temporal-parietal junction area, right homolog Wernicke\'s area, and right middle temporal gyrus contributed most to prediction performance. These results demonstrate that the activations of regions about sensory-motor mapping of sound, especially in noisy conditions, could be sensitive measures for age prediction than external behavior measures.
摘要：
噪声中的言语理解取决于周围感觉系统和中枢认知系统之间的复杂相互作用。尽管周围听力正常,老年人在言语理解方面表现出困难。目前尚不清楚大脑的神经反应是否表明衰老。当前的研究检查了在不同的听力环境中语音感知过程中个体大脑的激活是否可以预测年龄。我们在句子听力任务中对93名听力正常的成年人（20至70岁）应用了功能近红外光谱，其中包含一个安静的条件和4个不同的信噪比（SNR=10，5，0，-5dB）的噪声条件。数据驱动的方法，采用基于区域的脑年龄预测模型。我们观察到在4种嘈杂条件下，随着年龄的增长，行为显着下降，但不是在安静的条件下。SNR=10dB听音条件下的大脑激活可以成功预测个体的年龄。此外，我们发现双侧视觉感觉皮层，左背侧语音通路,左小脑,右颞顶交界区,右同源Wernicke\'s区,右颞中回对预测性能贡献最大。这些结果表明，关于声音的感觉运动映射的区域的激活，尤其是在嘈杂的环境中，可能是年龄预测的敏感措施，而不是外部行为措施。
