Stochastic undersampling steepens auditory threshold/duration functions: implications for understanding auditory deafferentation and aging.

It has long been known that some listeners experience hearing difficulties out of proportion with their audiometric losses. Notably, some older adults as well as auditory neuropathy patients have temporal-processing and speech-in-noise intelligibility deficits not accountable for by elevated audiometric thresholds. The study of these hearing deficits has been revitalized by recent studies that show that auditory deafferentation comes with aging and can occur even in the absence of an audiometric loss.