Relation between cortical auditory evoked potentials and behavioral auditory discrimination in cochlear implant children

Abstract

A large amount of variability in speech perception outcome exists among CI users. Factors contributing to these variations can be attributed to differences in amplitude, temporal and spectral resolution processing capabilities which are necessary to detect ongoing changes in the incoming complex speech signals. Psychophysical measures can be used to study performance variability. Unfortunately, these measures are confounded by numerous developmental and task-related variables especially in children. Cortical auditory evoked potential is one of the objective tests that reflect the neural detection and/or discrimination of sound underlying speech perception. Therefore, it is beneficial to assess outcome variability with CI. CAEPs include obligatory evoked potentials such as P1, N1, and P2, and discriminative potentials such as Acoustic change complex (ACC), mismatch negativity (MMN) and P300. ACC is preferred over other discriminative CAEPs in assessing children. Because, ACC shows good test retest reliability, has less testing time and doesn’t require active participation.