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1. Comparisons of Auditory Brainstem Responses Between a Laboratory and Simulated Home Environment

   https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_JSLHR-20-00383  

   Parker, Ashley; Slack, Candace; Skoe, Erika (November 2020, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research)

   null (Ed.)

   Purpose Miniaturization of digital technologies has created new opportunities for remote health care and neuroscientific fieldwork. The current study assesses comparisons between in-home auditory brainstem response (ABR) recordings and recordings obtained in a traditional lab setting. Method Click-evoked and speech-evoked ABRs were recorded in 12 normal-hearing, young adult participants over three test sessions in (a) a shielded sound booth within a research lab, (b) a simulated home environment, and (c) the research lab once more. The same single-family house was used for all home testing. Results Analyses of ABR latencies, a common clinical metric, showed high repeatability between the home and lab environments across both the click-evoked and speech-evoked ABRs. Like ABR latencies, response consistency and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) were robust both in the lab and in the home and did not show significant differences between locations, although variability between the home and lab was higher than latencies, with two participants influencing this lower repeatability between locations. Response consistency and SNR also patterned together, with a trend for higher SNRs to pair with more consistent responses in both the home and lab environments. Conclusions Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of obtaining high-quality ABR recordings within a simulated home environment that closely approximate those recorded in a more traditional recording environment. This line of work may open doors to greater accessibility to underserved clinical and research populations. 

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2. Hearing ability of prairie voles ( Microtus ochrogaster )

   https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0024357  

   New, Emily M; Hurd, Jessica A; Alarcon, Genesis A; Miller, Cameron S; Williams, Peyton A; Greene, Nathaniel T; Sergott, Casey E; Li, Ben-Zheng; Lei, Tim C; McCullagh, Elizabeth A (January 2024, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America)

   The hearing abilities of mammals are impacted by factors such as social cues, habitat, and physical characteristics. Despite being used commonly to study social behaviors, hearing of the monogamous prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster) has never been characterized. In this study, anatomical features are measured and auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) are used to measure auditory capabilities of prairie voles, characterizing monaural and binaural hearing and hearing range. Sexually naive male and female voles were measured to characterize differences due to sex. It was found that prairie voles show a hearing range with greatest sensitivity between 8 and 32 kHz, binaural hearing across interaural time difference ranges appropriate for their head sizes. No differences are shown between the sexes in binaural hearing or hearing range (except at 1 kHz), however, female voles have increased amplitude of peripheral ABR waves I and II and longer latency of waves III and IV compared to males. The results confirm that prairie voles have a broad hearing range, binaural hearing consistent with rodents of similar size, and differences in amplitudes and thresholds of monaural physiological measures between the sexes. These data further highlight the necessity to understand sex-specific differences in neural processing that may underly variability in responses between sexes. 

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3. Prolonged Auditory Brainstem Response in Universal Hearing Screening of Newborns with Autism Spectrum Disorder

   https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.2422  

   Miron, Oren; Delgado, Rafael E.; Delgado, Christine F.; Simpson, Elizabeth A.; Yu, Kun‐Hsing; Gutierrez, Anibal; Zeng, Guangyu; Gerstenberger, Jillian N.; Kohane, Isaac S. (November 2020, Autism Research)

   null (Ed.)

   Previous studies report prolonged auditory brainstem response (ABR) in children and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Despite its promise as a biomarker, it is unclear whether healthy newborns who later develop ASD also show ABR abnormalities. In the current study, we extracted ABR data on 139,154 newborns from their Universal Newborn Hearing Screening, including 321 newborns who were later diagnosed with ASD. We found that the ASD newborns had significant prolongations of their ABR phase and V‐negative latency compared with the non‐ASD newborns. Newborns in the ASD group also exhibited greater variance in their latencies compared to previous studies in older ASD samples, likely due in part to the low intensity of the ABR stimulus. These findings suggest that newborns display neurophysiological variation associated with ASD at birth. Future studies with higher‐intensity stimulus ABRs may allow more accurate predictions of ASD risk, which could augment the universal ABR test that currently screens millions of newborns worldwide. 

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4. Newborn Auditory Brainstem Responses in Children with Developmental Disabilities

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-05126-1  

   Delgado, Christine F.; Simpson, Elizabeth A.; Zeng, Guangyu; Delgado, Rafael E.; Miron, Oren (June 2021, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders)

   We integrated data from a newborn hearing screening database and a preschool disability database to examine the relationship between newborn click evoked auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) and developmental disabilities. This sample included children with developmental delay (n = 2992), speech impairment (SI, n = 905), language impairment (n = 566), autism spectrum disorder (ASD, n = 370), and comparison children (n = 128,181). We compared the phase of the ABR waveform, a measure of sound processing latency, across groups. Children with SI and children with ASD had greater newborn ABR phase values than both the comparison group and the developmental delay group. Newborns later diagnosed with SI or ASD have slower neurological responses to auditory stimuli, suggesting sensory differences at birth. 

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5. The Effect of Speech Masking on the Human Subcortical Response to Continuous Speech

   https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0561-24.2025  

   Polonenko, Melissa J; Maddox, Ross K (April 2025, eNeuro)

   Auditory masking—the interference of the encoding and processing of an acoustic stimulus imposed by one or more competing stimuli—is nearly omnipresent in daily life and presents a critical barrier to many listeners, including people with hearing loss, users of hearing aids and cochlear implants, and people with auditory processing disorders. The perceptual aspects of masking have been actively studied for several decades, and particular emphasis has been placed on masking of speech by other speech sounds. The neural effects of such masking, especially at the subcortical level, have been much less studied, in large part due to the technical limitations of making such measurements. Recent work has allowed estimation of the auditory brainstem response (ABR), whose characteristic waves are linked to specific subcortical areas, to naturalistic speech. In this study, we used those techniques to measure the encoding of speech stimuli that were masked by one or more simultaneous other speech stimuli. We presented listeners with simultaneous speech from one, two, three, or five simultaneous talkers, corresponding to a range of signal-to-noise ratios (clean, 0, −3, and −6 dB), and derived the ABR to each talker in the mixture. Each talker in a mixture was treated in turn as a target sound masked by other talkers, making the response quicker to acquire. We found consistently across listeners that ABR Wave V amplitudes decreased and latencies increased as the number of competing talkers increased. 

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