TY - JOUR AB - OBJECTIVE: The auditory brainstem response can be recorded non-invasively from scalp electrodes and serves as an important clinical measure of hearing function. We have recently shown how the brainstem response at the fundamental frequency of continuous, non-repetitive speech can be measured, and have used this measure to demonstrate that the response is modulated by selective attention. However, different parts of the speech signal as well as several parts of the brainstem contribute to this response. Here we employ a computational model of the brainstem to elucidate the influence of these different factors. APPROACH: We developed a computational model of the auditory brainstem by combining a model of the middle and inner ear with a model of globular bushy cells in the cochlear nuclei and with a phenomenological model of the inferior colliculus. We then employed the model to investigate the neural response to continuous speech at different stages in the brainstem, following the methodology developed recently by ourselves for detecting the brainstem response to running speech from scalp recordings. We compared the simulations with recordings from healthy volunteers. MAIN RESULTS: We found that the auditory-nerve fibers, the cochlear nuclei and the inferior colliculus all contributed to the speech-evoked brainstem response, although the dominant contribution came from the inferior colliculus. The delay of the response corresponded to that observed in experiments. We further found that a broad range of harmonics of the fundamental frequency, up to about 8 kHz, contributed to the brainstem response. The response declined with increasing fundamental frequency, although the signal-to-noise ratio was largely unaffected. SIGNIFICANCE: Our results suggest that the scalp-recorded brainstem response at the fundamental frequency of speech originates predominantly in the inferior colliculus. They further show that the response is shaped by a large number of higher harmonics of AU - Saiz-Alia,M AU - Reichenbach,T DO - 1741-2552/ab970d EP - 12 PY - 2020/// SN - 1741-2552 SP - 1 TI - Computational modeling of the auditory brainstem response to continuous speech. T2 - Journal of Neural Engineering UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1741-2552/ab970d UR - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32460257 UR - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-2552/ab970d UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/79542 VL - 17 ER -