The proposed grant will provide for career development and training as well as support for research. The overall goal is to combine research training with my clinical experience to make both experiences more effective and more meaningful. Career development will include formal course work in the basic science underlying auditory event-related potentials (ERPs), including neuroscience, and neuroanatomy & physiology. Mentored career development will include the areas of multi-channel ERPs, including topographic analysis, brain development, ERP maturation, and the responsible conduct of research. Further activities will include travel to respected laboratories in electrophysiology, and attendance at national and international clinical and scientific conferences. (Course work in multivar1ate statistics is not included, as I have had three courses at the doctoral level). The acoustic change complex (ACC) is a cortically generated ERP seen approximately 100 ms after an acoustic change in an ongoing sound. The proposed research will determine whether the ACC can be used as an efficient clinical electrophysiological test of auditory perceptual processing. The major questions to be addressed include: 1) Is the ACC a reliable and stable tool for examining the processing of acoustic change? 2) What is the most efficient means of eliciting the ACC in order to minimize patient testing time and maximize ACC amplitude? 3) Is the ACC reliably elicited in children? If so, how does it change with maturation? 4) Can the ACC be used to predict behavioral discrimination performance in listeners with hearing loss? 5) What are the roles of primary and secondary cortical fields in ACC generation?
