Contingent negative variation audiometry in children.

The aim of the present work was to establish whether contingent negative variation audiometry (CNV-A) is applicable to children. In a group of 23 children aged 5-7 years, only 10 generated clearly recognizable CNV when tested with the method successfully used in adults. When the procedure was modified by prolonging the S1-S2 interval and by introducing attractive slides to serve as the S2 stimulus and by adopting a slower repetition rate, 9 children randomly selected from the former group generated high-amplitude CNV (10.1 +/- 4 mu V). The CNV-A measurements involving a longer auditory stimulus (S1), lasting nearly to the beginning of S2, and an even slower repetition rate were equally successful in 18 children aged 3-5 years, who generated CNV with an average amplitude of about 9 mu V (range 5-15 mu V). We believe that the basic problem of successful CNV recording in children is to attract their attention to the signals of the CNV paradigm. The child's attentiveness decreases rapidly. The mean difference and the absolute mean difference between the subjective hearing threshold for white noise and the perception threshold for white noise as determined by CNV-A were as follows: 8.8 +/- 8 dB (both values) for the older group, and 3 +/- 10.4 and 8.6 +/- 6.5 dB, respectively, for the younger group. These differences are quite comparable to those obtained in adults. We therefore believe that CNV-A, used in combination with the behavioral method, provides a most reliable estimate of the child's hearing threshold in dubious situations.