A multichannel vestibular prosthesis that delivers electrical stimulation to the perilymph of individual semicircular canals is a potential new treatment modality for patients with vestibular deficiencies. Most research in this field has evaluated the efficacy of this approach by its ability to reproduce eye movements in response to head rotations. Our group has developed such a device and implanted it in four human subjects with intractable unilateral Meniere's disease. This allows us to evaluate individual semicircular canal contribution to the control of balance and posture in human subjects. In this report, we demonstrate that electrical stimulation trains delivered to the perilymph of individual semicircular canals elicit postural responses specific to the particular canal stimulated, with some current spread to adjacent end organs. Modulation of stimulation current modulates the amplitude of the postural response. However, eye movements elicited by the same electrical stimuli were not consistent with postural responses in magnitude or direction in all subjects. Taken together, these findings support the feasibility of a vestibular prosthesis for the control of balance and illustrate new challenges for the development of this technology.
This study examined speakers of American English and Korean languages with normal hearing to assess their ability to understand intact as well as vocoded speech. Speech perception abilities were assessed using vowels, consonants, and consonant-nucleus vowel-consonant (CNC) words belonging to the English language. Stimuli were processed using three different methods: (1) intact speech, (2) temporal envelope speech (E), or (3) temporal fine structure (TFS) speech. It was hypothesized that native speakers would perform better than non-native speakers when acoustic information was limited to envelope and TFS cues. Overall, both groups showed a significant effect of stimulus condition with performance being best for the intact condition, followed by the E- and TFS-conditions, respectively. Between groups, American English speakers outperformed the Korean speakers particularly for E, and TFS-conditions, suggesting that a person’s native language experience provides an advantage when acoustic information is limited to E and TFS cues. Moreover, compared to non-native speakers, we speculate that prior language experience enables native speakers to compare E and TFS cues to an existing memory base so they can better use limited acoustic information. [Work supported by NIH NIDCD Grant No. R01-DC007705 and T32-DC000033.]
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