摘要A frequency following response (FFR) of speech auditory brainstem response (speech-ABR) elicited by the speech syllable/da/contains three distinct waves named as D, E and F, corresponding to the structure of the stimulus sound. The detection and characterization of FFRs are critical in the study and application of speech-ABRs. Conventional methods detect the latencies of the waves in time domain by measuring the maximal amplitudes of the waveform in the preset windows, which suffers the problem of low quality of FFR waves. In this paper, we defined an instantaneous energy (IE) spectrum based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method (EMD-IE method) to detect FFR and measured the latencies of the waves. The results reveal that the FFRs are mostly evident on the second layer of the IE spectra, which would benefit the detection and measurement of the FFRs in clinic.