Interplay between singing and cortical processing of music: a longitudinal study in children with cochlear implants

Abstract

Informal music activities such as singing may lead to augmented auditory perception and attention. In order to study the accuracy and development of music-related sound change detection in children with cochlear implants (CIs) and normal hearing (NH) aged 4–13 years, we recorded their auditory event-related potentials twice (at T1 and T2, 14–17 months apart). We compared their MMN (preattentive discrimination) and P3a (attention toward salient sounds) to changes in piano tone pitch, timbre, duration, and gaps. Of particular interest was to determine whether singing can facilitate auditory perception and attention of CI children. It was found that, compared to the NH group, the CI group had smaller and later timbre P3a and later pitch P3a, implying degraded discrimination and attention shift. Duration MMN became larger from T1 to T2 only in the NH group. The development of response patterns for duration and gap changes were not similar in the CI and NH groups. Importantly, CI singers had enhanced or rapidly developing P3a or P3a-like responses over all change types. In contrast, CI non-singers had rapidly enlarging pitch MMN without enlargement of P3a, and their timbre P3a became smaller and later over time. These novel results show interplay between MMN, P3a, brain development, cochlear implantation, and singing. They imply an augmented development of neural networks for attention and more accurate neural discrimination associated with singing. In future studies, differential development of P3a between CI and NH children should be taken into account in comparisons of these groups. Moreover, further studies are needed to assess whether singing enhances auditory perception and attention of children with CIs.

Voice emotion perception and production in cochlear implant users

“…Longitudinal musical training studies consistently suggest that music training provides speech-related benefits, such as phonological awareness, perception of vowel duration, and speech segmentation, to NH listeners (Hausen, et al, 2013; Degé & Schwarzer, 2011) and benefits in melodic and pitch perception to CI users (Chen et al, 2010; Galvin, et al, 2007). Torppa et al (2014) found that CI children participating in music or dance activities over a period of 16 months performed similarly to NH children in tasks of pitch discrimination and word stress perception, whereas CI children participating in non-musical tasks over the course of the study performed more poorly. Patel (2014) provided preliminary evidence that melodic contour training with an emphasis on contour precision perception can improve intonation perception, and a recent study (Yhun Lo, et al, 2015) demonstrated improvements in question-statement discrimination and other speech perception parameters as a result of melodic contour training in adult CI users, both interval-based and duration-based (Figure 6, Yhun Lo, et al, 2015).…”

The Effects of Musical Experience and Hearing Loss on Solving an Audio-Based Gaming Task

“…Effects of the training were found in linguistic identification tests after controlled training of combining the acoustic information of a hearing aid with the electric information from a cochlear implant [47]. Some of these results are related to brain development [1,46].…”

“…Experiments related to the perception of pitch vary from basic pitch discrimination tasks [41] to memorization [36], singing [1], and recognition [40] of melodies. Experiments related to exploring the role of temporal information for melody recognition have included both tempo and rhythm as well as pitch information [42].…”

“…Various experiments have investigated possible long-term effects of informal music activities provided to participants at schools [1], and measured the effectiveness of long-term music lessons for improving the perception of environmental sounds [45]. In short-term training for cochlear implant users, little progress was found in terms of music skills [46].…”

“…Hence, music can provide similar benefits to both groups [1]. However, it is well known that people with hearing impairment listen to music much less.…”