The objective of the study was to assess the sacculocollic and otolith ocular pathway function using cervical vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (cVEMP) and ocular vestibular myogenic potentials (oVEMP) in dancers and non dancers. Total 16 subjects participated in the study. Out of 16 participants, 8 were trained in Indian classical form of dance (dancers) and other 8 participants who were not trained in any dance form (non dancers). cVEMP and oVEMP responses were recorded for all the subjects. Non Parametric Mann-Whitney U test revealed no significant difference between dancers and non dancers for the latency and amplitude parameter for cVEMP and oVEMP, i.e. P13, N23 latency and P13-N23 complex amplitude and N10, P14 latency, N10-P14 complex amplitude respectively. The vestibular system comprises of several structures. It is possible that the dance style practiced by the dancer’s group assessed in this study does not contribute towards improving the plasticity of the sacculocollic and otolith-ocular pathways. It can be concluded that not all forms of dance training brings about a change in the plasticity of the sacculocollic and otolithocular pathways.

This study aimed at characterizing the gap detection threshold (GDT) and speech evoked ABR (SABR) in younger and middle-aged individuals. Two groups of subjects were participated in the study which includes 15 young adults in the age range of 15-25 years and 15 middle-aged individuals in the age range of 40-60 years. SABR with stimulus/da/of 40 ms and GDT were investigated on both groups. For SABR, Mann-Whitney U test revealed that ageing has significantly adverse effect on the encoding of F1 and F2 at brainstem level. However, no significant effect of ageing (till middle age) on the encoding of F0 was observed in present study. Mann-Whitney U test also showed significant longer latency of wave V in middle-aged individuals compared to younger adults. Furthermore, GDT was significantly better in younger adults compared to middle-aged individuals according to Mann-Whitney U test. This study also revealed no significant correlation between GDT and F0, F1, F2 for younger as well as middle-aged individuals. The findings of this study showed poor encoding of certain aspects of speech at brainstem level in middle-aged individuals compared to younger adults. This study also revealed deterioration of auditory processes in middle-aged individuals.

Background:The neural representation of different speech stimuli (phonemes) can be measured at the cortex using electrophysiological techniques, a procedure called speech-evoked cortical potentials. Each phoneme produces cortical potentials with different temporal and spectral properties. Latency and amplitude measures reflect changes in the way different phonemes are neurally represented, so these measures are expected to change with maturation of the system, that is with age. The aim of the present study to investigate whether there were differences in latency and amplitude between children and adults in response to the three phonemes /m/, /g/, and /t/.Material and methods: Exactly 10 normal-hearing children of age 5-7 years and 10 normal-hearing adults of age 17-24 years were recruited. Speech-evoked cortical potential were recorded using the HEARLab (v.1.0) auditory evoked potential system. Non-parametric statistics were used to compare both groups.Results: Mann-Whitney U-tests shows statistically significant differences between children and adults for both the latency and amplitude of wave P1 and N1 at the 0.05 level. At the same time, there were no significant differences between /m/, /g/, and /t/ for children and adults at the same level when a Kruskal-Wallis test was applied. Conclusions:The present study shows there are differences between children and adults in terms of the latency and amplitude of their cortical potential responses, but the particular phoneme used does not appear to make a difference.