SANSKRIT PROSODY: A POTENTIAL TOOL TO IMPACT NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL VARIABLES IN MIDDLE SCHOOL CHILDREN

Abstract

Background /Aim: Psychological changes during transition from primary to middle school are immense, leading to a lack of attention in children. Chanting has been beneficial to improve attention and other cognitive parameters, but the impact of individual elements of chanting is yet to be explored. The current four-armed comparative study was attempted to explore the impact of prosody/Chanda on sustained attention and response interference in middle school children. Methods: A total of 138 students (12.12 ± 0.74 years) were recruited from grades 7 and 8 of an English medium School and were allocated into four groups; Humming a Chanda (HC), Chanting a Sanskrit verse (CS), Reading an English verse (RE) and Silent sitting (SS). Fifteen minutes of the intervention was provided every day, divided into three sessions of 5 minutes each for four weeks. Baseline and post-intervention data were collected using Digit Letter Substitution Test (DLST) and Stroop color-word test. Results: The current study had a cent percent adherence to the protocol. Within-group analysis using sample t-test demonstrated significant changes in HC, CS, and SS groups (p<0.001) with DLST scores. Post-hoc analysis revealed that the CS group had higher scores; however, there were no differences between the HC and CS groups. Stroop scores improved in all groups except for the SS group. Post-hoc analysis to examine the superiority between groups presented a higher statistical significance in CS group when compared to HC group. A statistical significance was also observed between the chanting and SS group. There were statistical differences within the group in both HC and CS groups in the Stroop mistake scores, but no differences were observed between groups. Conclusion: Our study results revealed that humming prosody and chanting a mantra have similar effects on sustained attention; however, humming has no effect on response interference among middle school children.