PURPOSE This study looked at the physiological effects of performance in Highland-dance competition to consider whether the traditional methods used during class and rehearsal provide an appropriate training stimulus toward this performance. METHODS Nine championship standard, female Highland dancers (age 14.2 +/- 1.47 years) had their heart rate and blood lactate concentrations measured befo...

Emerging evidence suggests that sleep plays a key role in procedural learning, particularly in the continued development of motor skill learning following initial acquisition. We argue that a detailed examination of the time course of performance across sleep on the finger-tapping task, established as the paradigm for studying the effect of sleep on motor learning, will help distinguish a resto...

The effects of musical interference and noise on pitch-matching accuracy were examined. Vocal training was explored as a factor influencing pitch-matching accuracy, and the relationship between pitch matching and pitch discrimination was examined. Twenty trained singers (TS) and 20 untrained individuals (UT) vocally matched tones in six conditions (immediate, four types of chords, noise). Funda...

Introduction: Mucous retention cysts are a subtype of intracordal vocal cysts that may occur spontaneously or may be associated with poor vocal hygiene, and which require optimal treatment. The objective of this study was to present a new laser-assisted microsurgery technique for treating intracordal mucous retention cysts and to describe the final outcomes.   Materials and Methods: In this pro...

Introduction: Unilateral vocal cord paralysis (UVCP) is not an uncommon finding. Several procedures are available to manage glottal insufficiency. We conducted a clinical trial to evaluate the outcome of fat injection laryngoplasty.   Materials and Methods: Liposuctioned lower abdomen fat was injected for augmentation of paralyzed vocal cord in 20 patients with UVCP. Autologous fat was harveste...

This paper extends prior work on knowledge consolidation and the stability-plasticity problem within the context of a Lifelong Machine Learning (LML) system. A contextsensitive multiple task learning (csMTL) neural network is used as a consolidated domain knowledge store. Prior work has demonstrated that a csMTL network, in combination with task rehearsal, can retain previous task knowledge whe...

Objective: The purpose of this study was to compare acoustic data for the following vocal parameters to assess vocal noise in dysphonic participant’s pre and post stimulability training: Relative Average Perturbations (RAP), Shimmer, and Noise-Harmonic Ratio (NHR) using the Multi-Dimensional Voice Program (MDVP) were assessed. The objective was to determine if stimulability training could impro...

Learned vocalization, the substrate for human language, is a rare trait. It is found in three distantly related groups of birds-parrots, hummingbirds, and songbirds. These three groups contain cerebral vocal nuclei for learned vocalization not found in their more closely related vocal nonlearning relatives. Here, we cloned 21 receptor subunits/subtypes of all four glutamate receptor families (A...