Anna Samsel comes from Ostrołęka in Poland. She graduated Audiophonology and Public Health at Warsaw Medical University. She also obtained a MSc degree in the Applications of Physics in Biology and Medicine, specialty Neuroinformatics at the University of Warsaw. She participated in ERASMUS exchange programme studying one year at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her master thesis in field of audiology concerned Auditory Steady State Responses (ASSR) for chirp stimuli with the presence of different masking noises. Currently Anna is working as a PhD student at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven under the supervision of Prof. Jan Wouters.

Given that MRI and MEG measures are not applicable in cochlear implant children, the cortical networks involved in hearing with cochlear implants are currently limited studied (for a review see Gordon et al., 2011). By recording ASSR for high (80 Hz) and low (4-20 Hz) modulated sounds both subcortical and cortical auditory networks can be investigated. Second, whereas previous studies mainly focused on the critical age of Cl-implementation for the recovery of a functional auditory system, they did not investigate how this recovery evolves during development (Gilley et al., 2008). Therefore a longitudinal study will be implemented in which ASSR is recorded in Cl-children at different time points (before, early after and late after implantation CI). This way we can determine whether the period of deafness or the impoverished auditory input via CI reflects on the developmental rate of the auditory system in the brain. Second, little is known on the individual differences in auditory and speech perception measures in relation to the development of the auditory system. The development of the auditory system will be measured via ASSR in response to 4Hz and 20Hz amplitude modulated sounds because they target syllable and phoneme identification, respectively.