The brainstem response to speech: A biological marker of auditory processing

The auditory brain stem response to speech mimics the acoustic characteristics of the speech signal with remarkable fidelity. This makes it possible to derive from it considerable theoretical and clini-cally applicable information relevant to auditory processing of complex stimuli. Years of research have led to the current characterization of these neural events with respect to the underlying acous-tic information they reflect. The majority of data reviewed here originates from studies using a /da/ syllable to elicit the brain stem response, which consists of transient and periodic (frequency fol-lowing) neural activity. We describe how the human auditory brain stem response separately encodes source and filter characteristics of the acousti