The Use of Heart Rate Responses Extracted From Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Data as a Measure of Speech Discrimination Ability in Sleeping Infants.

Objectives: Cardiac responses (e.g., heart rate changes) due to an autonomous response to sensory stimuli have been reported in several studies.

Speech token detection and discrimination in individual infants using functional near-infrared spectroscopy.

Speech detection and discrimination ability are important measures of hearing ability that may inform crucial audiological intervention decisions for individuals with a hearing impairment. However, behavioral assessment of speech discrimination can be difficult and inaccurate in infants, prompting the need for an objective measure of speech detection and discrimination ability. In this study, the authors used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) as the objective measure.