Using magnetoencephalography in assessing auditory skills in infants and children.

In this paper, the use of magnetoencephalography (MEG) in studying the basic auditory skills in infants and children is reviewed. The auditory skills are related to perceiving sound onsets and offsets of sounds, extracting rules and regularities in sound environments, perceiving differences and changes in sounds, categorizing sound elements, allocating attention towards certain sounds or sound streams, and attaching semantic information into sounds. Studying each of these auditory skills with MEG in particular stimulation paradigms is shortly reviewed, including two examples of data sets in children.