Auditory ERP in extremely premature 5-year-old children
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Updated: Oct 23, 2026
P50 Sensory Gating in Infants
Published on: December 25, 2013
Jasmin Léveillé1, Philippe Robaey, Yong-Liang Ge
1Department of Psychiatry, Sainte-Justine Hospital, University of Montréal, Québec, Canada. philippe.robaey@umontreal.ca
Insights
Premature children show impaired auditory processing, specifically lacking brain responses to rare tones. This suggests developmental challenges in auditory discrimination for those born extremely preterm.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Developmental Psychology
- Auditory Neuroscience
Background:
- Premature birth, particularly before 28 weeks of gestation, can impact neurodevelopmental outcomes.
- Auditory processing skills are crucial for language acquisition and cognitive development.
- Understanding the long-term effects of extreme prematurity on auditory function is essential.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate functional impairments in automatic deviant tone detection in children born extremely preterm.
- To compare auditory processing abilities between extremely preterm children and age-matched full-term controls.
- To examine brain responses (N100 and N200 components) to auditory stimuli in these groups.
Main Methods:
- Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to record brain responses in 141 extremely preterm children (25-28 weeks gestational age) and 45 full-term controls.
- Participants passively listened to sequences of pure tones, with rare deviant tones presented.
- Event-related potentials, specifically the N100 and N200 components, were analyzed to assess auditory processing.
Main Results:
- Both groups exhibited a contralateral organization of the N100 response, indicating normal early auditory pathway function.
- Full-term controls showed a significant increase in the frontal N200 response to rare tones compared to frequent tones.
- Extremely preterm children did not exhibit this N200 modulation, indicating a deficit in processing complex, infrequent auditory information.
Conclusions:
- Children born extremely preterm demonstrate a specific impairment in the automatic detection of deviant auditory stimuli.
- This deficit in higher-order auditory processing, reflected by the lack of N200 modulation, may impact cognitive and language development.
- Early identification and intervention for auditory processing difficulties in extremely preterm infants are warranted.
Abstract:
The aim of this research was to test the hypothesis of a functional impairment in the automatic detection of deviant tones in 141 children born after 25 to 28 weeks of gestational age, as compared to 45 age-matched full-term control children. All of them were assessed at age 5 years 9 months and instructed to listen passively to two different pure tones (1000 vs 1200 Hz; 20 vs 80%) counterbalanced between ears. Rarity was thus defined by specific ear by tone combinations. The temporal N100 showed a clear contralateral functional organization of the central auditory pathway, especially for the left ear, but without group difference. By contrast, in full-term controls but not in premature children, the central N200 was specifically increased over frontal leads to rare stimuli as compared to frequent. Premature children demonstrated a lack of brain response when more complex processing integrating different informations was required.
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