Effects of contralateral speech competition on the late auditory evoked potential in children.

Researchers recently reported evidence of a possible electrophysiologic correlate of impaired binaural processing or attention in elderly subjects. This experiment found that the presence of speech competition in the contralateral nontest ear produced significantly greater decreases in the peak-to-peak amplitude of the N1-P2 component of the late auditory evoked potential (LAEP) in an older group of subjects (50 to 80 years of age) than in a younger group (20 to 49 years). The present study used this same test paradigm with groups of children ranging in age from 7.5 to 14.9 years of age to investigate whether a comparable age-related effect might be found at the other end of the normal age spectrum in younger children. While the present children did exhibit statistically significant reductions in LAEP amplitude in the presence of speech competition, the magnitude of this effect did not differ among the different age groups.