PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Marina Saiz-Alía
AU  - Peter Miller
AU  - Tobias Reichenbach
TI  - Otoacoustic Emissions Evoked by the Time-Varying Harmonic Structure of Speech
AID  - 10.1523/ENEURO.0428-20.2021
DP  - 2021 Mar 01
TA  - eneuro
PG  - ENEURO.0428-20.2021
VI  - 8
IP  - 2
4099  - http://www.eneuro.org/content/8/2/ENEURO.0428-20.2021.short
4100  - http://www.eneuro.org/content/8/2/ENEURO.0428-20.2021.full
SO  - eNeuro2021 Mar 01; 8
AB  - The human auditory system is exceptional at comprehending an individual speaker even in complex acoustic environments. Because the inner ear, or cochlea, possesses an active mechanism that can be controlled by subsequent neural processing centers through descending nerve fibers, it may already contribute to speech processing. The cochlear activity can be assessed by recording otoacoustic emissions (OAEs), but employing these emissions to assess speech processing in the cochlea is obstructed by the complexity of natural speech. Here, we develop a novel methodology to measure OAEs that are related to the time-varying harmonic structure of speech [speech-distortion-product OAEs (DPOAEs)]. We then employ the method to investigate the effect of selective attention on the speech-DPOAEs. We provide tentative evidence that the speech-DPOAEs are larger when the corresponding speech signal is attended than when it is ignored. Our development of speech-DPOAEs opens up a path to further investigations of the contribution of the cochlea to the processing of complex real-world signals.