New paper published in the Journal of Physiology by Samira Souffi, JM Edeline, Brice Bathelier, Chloé Huetz, and myself: "Reduction in sound discrimination in noise is related to envelope similarity and not to a decrease in envelope tracking abilities" https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1113/JP283526
In a nutshell: Samira did a fantastic job recording neuronal activity from six different levels of the auditory system from auditory nerve up to secondary auditory cortex in anesthetized guinea-pigs, in response to many different types of degraded stimuli: vocalizations from other guinea-pigs, either in quiet, vocoded (with various resolutions), in a stationnary noise or a more natural noise (at various SNRs)
Then we analysed how well auditory neurons along the ascending auditory pathway were able to track slow changes of the sounds temporal envelope. The answer is: pretty well in general. Figure below shows the correlations in the original condition between peri-stimulus time histograms (PSTHs) of subcortical and cortical recordings and the stimulus envelope, both filtered in three selected AM ranges (slow fluctuations, medium fluctuations, fast fluctuations).
