Auditory temporal resolution in children assessed by magnetoencephalography.

By means of magnetoencephalography we investigated the auditory-evoked fields (AEFs) elicited by broadband noise bursts in a gap-detection paradigm in children. AEFs of 16 healthy children (mean age 8.7 years) were recorded while they passively listened to 100-ms white-noise bursts with temporal gaps of 3, 6, 10 and 30 ms inserted after 5 or 50 ms. The peak of the earliest and largest positivity occurred at 97 ms and was evaluated by spatiotemporal source analysis. Psychophysical gap-detection thresholds were obtained for the same children. We found that the neuromagnetic gap responses corresponded to the psychoacoustic thresholds. AEFs thus provide an objective tool to assess auditory temporal resolution in children. Children's neuromagnetic response patterns differed significantly from the adult responses under the same experimental conditions.