In Brief:
Auditory event-related potentials were recorded in sound-field from ten prelingually deafened children with cochlear implants (CI) while actively performing oddball phonetic discrimination tasks. Tasks consisted of naturally-produced syllables that differed by one phonetic contrast: vowel place, voicing, vowel height, and place of articulation. With increasing acoustic-phonetic difficulty P3 latency and reaction time increased, whereas P3 amplitude and performance accuracy decreased, suggesting a similar hierarchy of acoustic-phonetic demand for both electrophysiological and behavioral measures. P3 was absent in four of the ten children, but only in the most difficult place of articulation task. These results underscore the significant value of the P3 potential as a sensitive cortical neural index of speech-sound processing in children with CI.
