Auditory evoked potentials in females with high and low acceptance of background noise when listening to speech

Acceptable noise level (ANL) is a measure of a listener's acceptance of background noise when listening to speech. A consistent finding in research on ANL is large intersubject variability in the acceptance of background noise. This variability is not related to age, gender, hearing sensitivity, type of background noise, speech perception in noise performance, cochlear responses, or efferent activity of the medial olivocochlear pathway. In the present study, auditory evoked potentials were examined in 21 young females with normal hearing with low and high acceptance of background noise to determine whether differences in judgments of background noise are related to differences measured in aggregate physiological responses from the auditory nervous system. Group differences in the auditory brainstem response, auditory middle latency response, and cortical, auditory late latency response indicate that differences in more central regions of the nervous system account for, at least in part, the variability in listeners' willingness to accept background noise when listening to speech.