Auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) are electrophysiological responses that reflect the neural activity in the brainstem in response to auditory stimuli, providing a non-invasive measure of subcortical auditory processing. While ABRs are typically measured in repeatedly-presented short acoustic stimuli (clicks, pure tones, speech syllables), different methods have recently been developed to derive ABRs from continuous natural speech (see Shan & Maddox, 2025; https://doi.org/10.1162/IMAG.a.19).   

The goal of this project is to establish a processing pipeline for speech-ABRs and to compare different methods for extracting ABRs from natural speech amongst each other and with a classic clinical ABR approach.

Your tasks:

-          Literature review on methods for extracting ABRs from continuous speech stimuli

-          Setting up a suitable experiment and recording of EEG data

-          Implementation of different analysis strategies for extracting speech ABRs

-          Comparison of SNRs, response latencies, and amplitudes across methods

What we expect from you:

-          You are interested in auditory neurophysiology and want to learn about EEG signal processing strategies

-          You like coding and can write your own analysis code (in Matlab, preferentially)

-          Prior experience with EEG is beneficial