Brain potentials to speech perception in noise for patients with schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is characterized with a series of cognitive impairment, including basic information processing such as auditory and speech perception. Especially, patients with schizophrenia experienced additional challenge for speech perception in noisy environment. In this study, brain activity in response to speech sounds was measured in quiet and 6-talker babble conditions from 25 schizophrenia patients and 20 healthy subjects. A double-oddball paradigm was employed, in which /ba/ was played as the standard stimulus with /da/ and /bu/ as the deviant stimuli. Results showed that the schizophrenia group had lower amplitude and longer latency of mismatched negativity (MMN) compared with control group in both the quiet and babble conditions. In addition, there was a significant interaction effect between listening condition and listener group, i.e., the 6-talker babble exerted greater disturbance for schizophrenia. Moreover, the analysis of theta band oscillation in the time window of MMN also supported the...