A novel method of brainstem auditory evoked potentials using complex verbal stimuli.

Background: The click and tone-evoked auditory brainstem responses are widely used in clinical practice due to their consistency and predictability. More recently, the speech-evoked responses have been used to evaluate subcortical processing of complex signals, not revealed by responses to clicks and tones.

Aims: Disyllable stimuli corresponding to familiar words can induce a pattern of voltage fluctuations in the brain stem resulting in a familiar waveform, and they can yield better information about brain stem nuclei along the ascending central auditory pathway.

Design and analysis of a solar reactor for anaerobic wastewater treatment.

The aim of this research was to design a solar heated reactor system to enhance the anaerobic treatment of wastewater or biological sludge at temperatures higher than the ambient air temperature. For the proposed reactor system, the solar energy absorbed by flat plate collectors was transferred to a heat storage tank, which continuously supplied an anaerobic-filter reactor with water at a maximum temperature of 35 degrees C. The packed reactor was a metallic cylindrical tank with a peripheral twin-wall enclosure.

Teacher perceptions of communication impairment at screening stage in preschool children living in Patras, Greece.

The general aim was to obtain piloting data for a series of experiments about the prevalence of communication impairment in preschool children in Greece. At this screening stage of the overall project, teacher perceptions of communication impairment in 57 kindergartens servicing 1113 children were examined via a questionnaire distributed in the urban region of Patras. The specific research goals were (1) to screen for specific categories of communication impairment such as articulation/phonology, receptive language, expressive language and pragmatics, hearing, stuttering, and voice, as they appear in the mainstreamed kindergarten population and (2) to offer comparative information on sex differences in communication impairment(s).