Reliability of the auditory brainstem responses to speech over one year in school-age children: A reply to Drs. McFarland and Cacace

Hornickel, Jane; Knowles, Erica; Kraus, Nina

doi:10.1016/j.heares.2012.03.014

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 19 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The strength of intersubject-response correlations that we saw for our sibling pairs is similar to the strength of correlations seen for dizygotic twins in a number of studies because, presumably, our sibling pairs share the same amount of genetic material on average as dizygotic twins and similarly have a shared home environment (Katsanis et al, 1997;Young et al, 1972). There is evidence that the auditory brainstem response to speech is relatively stable during the elementary and junior high school years (Hornickel et al, 2012a(Hornickel et al, , 2012bJohnson, Nicol & Kraus, 2008), but the strength of correlations seen for our sibling pairs even though they were up to 74 months apart in age (average 26 months) further supports the strong influence of relatedness on auditory brainstem function.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 84%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Speech‐evoked auditory brainstem responses reflect familial and cognitive influences

Hornickel

Lin

Kraus

2012

Developmental Science

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cortical function and related cognitive, language, and communication skills are genetically influenced. The auditory brainstem response to speech is linked to language skill, reading ability, cognitive skills, and speech-in-noise perception; however, the impact of shared genetic and environmental factors on the response has not been assessed. We assessed auditory brainstem responses to speech presented in quiet and background noise from 1) 23 pairs of same sex, same learning diagnosis siblings (Siblings), 2) 23 unrelated children matched on age, sex, IQ, and reading ability to one of the siblings (Reading-Matched), and 3) 22 pairs of unrelated children matched on age and sex but not on reading ability to the same sibling (Age/Sex-Matched). By quantifying response similarity as the intersubject response-to-response correlation for sibling pairs, reading-matched pairs, and age- and sex-matched pairs, we found that siblings had more similar responses than age- and sex-matched pairs and reading-matched pairs. Similarity of responses between siblings was as high as the similarity of responses collected from an individual over the course of the recording session. Responses from unrelated children matched on reading were more similar than responses from unrelated children matched only on age and sex, supporting previous data linking variations in auditory brainstem activity with variations in reading ability. These results suggest that auditory brainstem function can be influenced by siblingship and auditory-based communication skills such as reading, motivating the use of speech-evoked auditory brainstem responses for assessing risk of reading and communication impairments in family members.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 84%

“…Again, the responses were allowed to shift up to 1.5 ms in time to find the largest correlation coefficient. This type of measure of within‐subject variance has been shown to be reliable ( r = 0.741) over the course of one year of growth in children with a wide range of reading ability (Hornickel, Knowles & Kraus, ; Hornickel et al ., ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech‐evoked auditory brainstem responses reflect familial and cognitive influences

Hornickel

Lin

Kraus

2012

Developmental Science

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A fi nal practical and fundamental problem is that there are currently no available electrophysiological measures of suffi cient utility and reliability to be useful in the clinical assessment of APD (McFarland & Cacace, 2012;Hornickel et al, 2012). A plethora of measures and stimuli is used inconsistently from study to study, with no clear evidence of replicability across studies.…”

Section: Electrophysiologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolving concepts of developmental auditory processing disorder (APD): A British Society of Audiology APD Special Interest Group ‘white paper’

Moore

Rosen²,

Bamiou

et al. 2012

International Journal of Audiology

119

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Children with listening difficulties, but normal audiometry, may be diagnosed with APD. The diagnosis is typically based on poor performance on tests of perception of both non-speech and speech stimuli. However, non-speech test results correlate only weakly with evaluations of speech-in-noise processing, cognitive skills, and caregiver evaluations of listening ability. The interpretation of speech test results is confounded by the involvement of language processing mechanisms. Overall, listening ability is associated more with higher-level, cognitive and analytic processing than with lower-level sensory processing. Current diagnosis of a child with APD, rather than another problem (e.g. language impairment, LI), is determined more by the referral route than by the symptoms. Co-occurrence with other learning problems suggests that APD may be a symptom of a more varied neurodevelopmental disorder. Alternately, APD has been proposed as a cause of language-based disorders, but there is no one-to-one mapping between listening and language among individuals. Screening for APD may be most appropriately based on a well-validated, caregiver questionnaire that captures the fundamental problem of listening difficulties and identifies areas for further assessment and management. This approach has proved successful for LI, and may in future serve as a metric to help assess other, objective testing methods.

show abstract

“…These connections suggest that the brainstem can play a role in high-level aspects of speech processing (Diamond et al, 1969 ; Weedman and Ryugo, 1996 ; Mulders and Robertson, 2000 ; Du et al, 2011 ; Barbas et al, 2013 ). Training in languages or in music can affect the subcortical processing of speech as measured through the speech-evoked ABR (Musacchia et al, 2007 ; Hornickel et al, 2012 ). Furthermore, short, repeated intelligible speech stimuli elicit a larger ABR than reversed, unintelligible speech (Galbraith et al, 2004 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Auditory-Brainstem Response to Continuous, Non-repetitive Speech Is Modulated by the Speech Envelope and Reflects Speech Processing

Reichenbach

Braiman

Schiff

et al. 2016

Front. Comput. Neurosci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The auditory-brainstem response (ABR) to short and simple acoustical signals is an important clinical tool used to diagnose the integrity of the brainstem. The ABR is also employed to investigate the auditory brainstem in a multitude of tasks related to hearing, such as processing speech or selectively focusing on one speaker in a noisy environment. Such research measures the response of the brainstem to short speech signals such as vowels or words. Because the voltage signal of the ABR has a tiny amplitude, several hundred to a thousand repetitions of the acoustic signal are needed to obtain a reliable response. The large number of repetitions poses a challenge to assessing cognitive functions due to neural adaptation. Here we show that continuous, non-repetitive speech, lasting several minutes, may be employed to measure the ABR. Because the speech is not repeated during the experiment, the precise temporal form of the ABR cannot be determined. We show, however, that important structural features of the ABR can nevertheless be inferred. In particular, the brainstem responds at the fundamental frequency of the speech signal, and this response is modulated by the envelope of the voiced parts of speech. We accordingly introduce a novel measure that assesses the ABR as modulated by the speech envelope, at the fundamental frequency of speech and at the characteristic latency of the response. This measure has a high signal-to-noise ratio and can hence be employed effectively to measure the ABR to continuous speech. We use this novel measure to show that the ABR is weaker to intelligible speech than to unintelligible, time-reversed speech. The methods presented here can be employed for further research on speech processing in the auditory brainstem and can lead to the development of future clinical diagnosis of brainstem function.

show abstract

Reliability of the auditory brainstem responses to speech over one year in school-age children: A reply to Drs. McFarland and Cacace

Cited by 5 publications

References 19 publications

Speech‐evoked auditory brainstem responses reflect familial and cognitive influences

Speech‐evoked auditory brainstem responses reflect familial and cognitive influences

Evolving concepts of developmental auditory processing disorder (APD): A British Society of Audiology APD Special Interest Group ‘white paper’

The Auditory-Brainstem Response to Continuous, Non-repetitive Speech Is Modulated by the Speech Envelope and Reflects Speech Processing

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About