Possible macroscopic indicators of neural maturation in subcortical auditory pathways in school-age children

The examination of subcortical auditory processing by macroscopic electrophysiological measurements gains more and more interest in the group of school-age children, especially, in the objective diagnosis of the central auditory processing disorder. At the same time, recent behavioural and animal studies provided indicators for subcortical plasticity and neural maturation in auditory pathways in this age group. Therefore, it is important to examine which impact a possible neural maturation on subcortical large-scale electrophysiological diagnostic procedures has in this particular age. In this study, we compare auditory evoked brainstem responses of young adults and school-age children by a shift-invariant time-scale entropy as large-scale correlate of the neural group synchronization to an auditory stimulus. We found significant differences between these groups for binaurally evoked potentials under the condition of binaural fusion. It is therefore concluded that known difficulties in the evaluation of binaural interaction in children may stem from a neural maturation and increased plasticity.