People with normal hearing recognize more syllables or words in noise when these speech tokens are delayed from the noise onset. This improvement in recognition is referred to as “noise adaptation”. Here, we review our efforts to shed light on the possible mechanisms underlying noise adaptation and some individual factors that may affect it. We will show that users of cochlear implants show as much as adaptation to noise as do listeners with normal hearing. Since cochlear implants stimulate the auditory nerve directly and independently from the middle-ear muscle reflex or the medial olivocochlear reflex, this suggests that those peripheral reflexes are not necessary for noise adaptation to occur. We will also show that people adapt equally to highly fluctuating and stationary noises. This suggests that mechanisms other than neural dynamic range adaptation to the most common noise level are probably involved in noise adaptation. Lastly, we will show that impaired adaptation contributes to up to 10% of the speech-in-noise reception threshold loss shown by people with hearing loss. However, it does not contribute to speech-in-noise intelligibility difficulties related to age or to ‘hidden’ hearing loss.

Funding: Work supported by the Spanish MICIU, ref. PID2024-158683NB-I00.