Auditory Evoked Potential with Speech and Non-Speech Stimulus

Abstract

The current study was conducted to investigate and compare click stimulus and speech stimulus auditory evoked potentials. Auditory brainstem responses (ABRs), MLR, LLR were obtained on 42 normal hearing subjects at 70dBnHL level. Two stimuli, a standard acoustic click and the burst portion of the syllable |ba| were used to evoke the AEPs. The results of the present study indicate that AEPs can be obtained reliably with both click and speech stimuli. However, speech evoked AEPs exhibit stronger amplitude as compare to clicks for LLR test. This research results offer an opportunity to better understand speech processing from brain stem to auditory cortex level in normal and disordered population.  Study finding suggests that speech evoked AEPs might be more useful for differential diagnosis of population with various auditory processing disorders.