Auditory cortical potential: using different types of speech stimuli in children

Introduction  Auditory Evoked Potentials are electrical responses that occur in the central auditory pathways, resulting from acoustic stimulation. The use of speech stimuli to elicit the response of these potentials allows to understand information about speech coding and decoding in the central nervous system.

Purpose  To compare the Long Latency Auditory Evoked Potential of two different speech stimuli.

Methods  Thirty healthy school children of both genders, aged between 8 and 12 years, participated in the study. For the auditory evoked potentials, different speech stimuli were used for the auditory discrimination: Test 1 /ba/ x /da/ and Test 2 /pa/ x /da/. The stimuli were randomly presented: 20% infrequent and 80% frequent. The school children participated in an active auditory task and said [da] to identify the infrequent stimuli. The normality of the data was determined using the Shapiro-Wilk test. To compare the mean with Test 1 and Test 2, stimulation was performed using Student t test.

Results  There was a significant difference in P3 latency in the right ear, P2 amplitude in the right ear and P3 amplitude in the left ear. Longer values occurred with stimulus /ba/ x /da/.

Conclusion  The responses of long latency auditory evoked potentials vary depending on the stimulus and care in the analysis when using speech stimuli in the evaluation.

Evoked Potentials, Auditory; Speech; Child development; Child; Event-Related Potentials, P300