Investigation of CAEP components in different human ethnic groups based on their native languages

Abstract

Objective: Understanding and discovering neural mapping in brains that are interpreting human languages is a very difficult and complex process. However, this paper explored the cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEP) in different human ethnic groups to give us the ability to estimate and discover the hearing process in the human brain more efficiently. We investigated and compared the patterns of neural activity of the CAEP for normal hearing ethnic groups among Malay and Chinese groups. Methods: The recorded CAEP signals that were evoked by simple pure tones and complex sounds naturally produced by Malay (consonant-vowels) were averaged and listed. A t-test and a two-way ANOVA were used to determine the significant differences in the average CAEP amplitude and latency for the responses elicited by different stimuli. Finally, classification algorithms were used to discover the human brain’s abilities in distinguishing between stimulus contrasts. Results: The mean amplitude of the auditory N1 and P1 were weakened in the Chinese group compared with Malay group. In the Chinese group, the P3 component had large values for latencies and most of the amplitudes compared with the Malay group. The classification performances for the Chinese group was excellent and reached a high score for all classifier algorithms used. Conclusion: The Chinese group had a slightly higher probability of hearing loss than the Malay group. Furthermore, the Chinese group showed a very good distinguishing ability in recognizing auditory stimuli, and they had a higher classification accuracy compared with the Malay group.