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Development of human cochlear active mechanism asymmetry: Involvement of the medial olivocochlear system?
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Development of human cochlear active mechanism asymmetry: Involvement of the medial olivocochlear system?

T. Morlet, L. Goforth, L. J. Hood, C. Ferber, R. Duclaux and C. I. Berlin
Hearing research, v 134(1-2), pp 153-162
01 Aug 1999
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-5955(99)00078-7
PMID: 10452385
Featured in Collection :   UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel

Abstract

Auditory asymmetry Efferent auditory pathway Maturation Neonate Otoacoustic emission
To study the functional development of the medial olivocochlear system, transient-evoked otoacoustic emission suppression experiments were conducted in 73 ears of 38 pre-term and 11 full-term neonates. The continuous contralateral stimulation was a broad band white noise, presented at 70 dB SPL. Efferent suppression was determined by subtracting the without- contralateral stimulation condition from the with-contralateral stimulation condition. Across this population, a mean suppression effect of contralateral stimulation on transient-evoked otoacoustic emissions was found, with most of the suppression effect observed after 8 ms. The amount of suppression is linearly, positively correlated with the conceptional age. In the subgroup of bilaterally tested neonates, the suppression of transient-evoked otoacoustic emissions is similar in the right ear and the left ear in subjects whose conceptional age is less than 36 weeks and significantly higher in the right ear than in the left ear in older neonates. This last observation was seen at frequencies where transient-evoked otoacoustic emission amplitudes became higher in the right ear than in the left ear as the conceptional age increased, a finding already reported in adults. This study shows that the functional adult pattern of the medial efferent system, probably involved in the detection of signals in noise such as speech sounds, seems to appear gradually in neonates and represents one of the several arguments in favor of functional auditory lateralization in humans, with a right ear advantage.

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Web of Science research areas
Audiology & Speech-language Pathology
Neurosciences
Otorhinolaryngology
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