title: Steady-state analysis of auditory evoked potentials over a wide range of stimulus repetition rates: profile in children vs. adults.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Auditory steady-state responses (ASSR) evoked by recurrent brief tones were assessed over a wide range of stimulus repetition rates apropos the traditionally measured obligatory, transient, auditory evoked potentials. Repetition rates of ≤ 10 Hz have received little attention in the context of the ASSR stimulus-response analysis approach, speculated to provide technical advantages/additional information over more traditional transient stimulus-response paradigms.
  
  
  METHODS
  Magnitudes were measured at repetition rates from 0.75 to 80 Hz, using trains of repeated tone-burst stimuli.
  
  
  METHODS
  Twelve normal-hearing children and a reference sample of 25 young adults.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Results show that response magnitudes were significantly larger in children than adults at repetition rates of ≤ 5 Hz. Magnitudes were largest at the two lowest repetition rates, following the trends expected from the transient auditory evoked potential (AEP) literature. The harmonic sum is proposed as a more appropriate measure of response magnitude than amplitude of the fundamental alone.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The analysis methods used in this paper may give information that will have applications for clinical testing. Of pragmatic importance is that the stimulus rate profile could be determined without subjective wave identification and/or interpretation, and thus by a method that is inherently more objective than conventional AEP analysis.
authors.affiliation: Veterans Administration Pittsburgh Healthcare System, Pennsylvania, USA.
authors.forename: Abreena I
authors.initials: AI
authors.lastname: Tlumak
authors.forename: John D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Durrant
authors.forename: Rafael E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Delgado
authors.forename: J Robert
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Boston
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001301:Audiometry, Pure-Tone; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D002648:Child; D016057:Evoked Potentials, Auditory, Brain Stem; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D016014:Linear Models; D011930:Reaction Time; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult