Benefits of Music Training for Perception of Emotional Speech Prosody in Deaf Children With Cochlear Implants

Objectives: Children who use cochlear implants (CIs) have characteristic
pitch processing deficits leading to impairments in music perception
and in understanding emotional intention in spoken language. Music
training for normal-hearing children has previously been shown to benefit
perception of emotional prosody. The purpose of the present study
was to assess whether deaf children who use CIs obtain similar benefits
from music training. We hypothesized that music training would lead
to gains in auditory processing and that these gains would transfer to
emotional speech prosody perception.
Design: Study participants were 18 child CI users (ages 6 to 15).
Participants received either 6 months of music training (i.e., individualized
piano lessons) or 6 months of visual art training (i.e., individualized
painting lessons). Measures of music perception and emotional speech
prosody perception were obtained pre-, mid-, and post-training. The
Montreal Battery for Evaluation of Musical Abilities was used to measure
five different aspects of music perception (scale, contour, interval,
rhythm, and incidental memory). The emotional speech prosody task
required participants to identify the emotional intention of a semantically
neutral sentence under audio-only and audiovisual conditions.
Results: Music training led to improved performance on tasks requiring the
discrimination of melodic contour and rhythm, as well as incidental memory
for melodies. These improvements were predominantly found from
mid- to post-training. Critically, music training also improved emotional
speech prosody perception. Music training was most advantageous in
audio-only conditions. Art training did not lead to the same improvements.
Conclusions: Music training can lead to improvements in perception
of music and emotional speech prosody, and thus may be an effective
supplementary technique for supporting auditory rehabilitation following
cochlear implantation.