The relation between long latency cortical auditory evoked potentials and stuttering severity in stuttering school-age children.

BACKGROUND

Disturbances in auditory processing and feedback have been suggested to play a role in the pathogenesis of developmental stuttering. Long latency cortical auditory evoked potentials in response to non-linguistic and linguistic stimuli can be used to investigate these disturbances. There were differences between developmental stuttering patients. However, there is no solid evidence of these differences to date.

OBJECTIVE

This study aims to determine whether there is a statistically significant difference in component P1-N1-P2 of long latency cortical auditory evoked potentials between stuttering school-aged children and non-stuttering children. In addition, the study aims to investigate the relationship between these potentials and objective quantitative measures of stuttering.

METHOD

The study included two groups, patients and controls, consisting of 40 subjects aged 6-12 years. For the cases group, the severity of stuttering symptoms and P1-N1-P2 responses to a non-linguistic stimulus were evaluated. In addition, the P1-N1-P2 responses of the matched control group were evaluated.

RESULTS

The P1-N1 responses were similar in both study groups, while P2 response was shorter in the patient group, but the difference was not statistically significant compared to the control group. N1 latency has the only statistically significant correlation with the percentage of repetitions, prolongation, and blocks. The female cases had a decreased, not statistically significant, latency than the male cases group.

CONCLUSION

In contrast to the previous finding, the study revealed a non-statistically significant different P1-N1, a non-statistically significant reduced P2 response to a non-linguistic stimulus, in CWS, in as evidence for basic auditory processing. The study also revealed a significant correlation between N1 latency and proportion of the repetition symptoms.