[Study of auditory brainstem response to speech sounds in sex differences]

To study the electrophysiological characteristics of the Auditory Brainstem Response to Speech Sounds (s-ABR) in healthy adults, and then analyze its relationship between noise speech recognition ability and sex.

We accessed the auditory brainstem response to a synthesized stop-consonant speech syllable / da/in 40 native-Chinese speech adults. Timing components of the response were compared between males and females to determine which aspects of the response are affected by sex. The relationship of the slope between the onset peak (V) and though (A) (V/A slope) and the noise speech recognition ability was analyzed.

A dissimilarity between males and females was observed in the response to the component that change rapidly over time(P< 0.05). The other peaks latency except (P < 0.01) was different between gender, the remaining peaks did not have statisticals differences (P > 0.05). Noise speech recognition and the V/A slope was negatively correlated (r = 0.478, P < 0.05), which indicated that the greater slope of V/A, the lower of the speech recognition threshold under noise.

The verbal components change rapidly over time, and high-frequency consonants evoked neural response obviously affected by gender. In the slower changing, lower frequency information in the stimulus was minimally affected by sex. The subjects with better abilities of processing transient and rapid information can show lower noise speech recognition threshold.