Singing proficiency of prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants as evaluated by a musician

Abstract

Cochlear implant (CI) has become the standard clinical rehabilitation device for children born with hearing impairments. While CI has been successful in helping those children with speech and language development, many studies have found that children with CIs have trouble perceiving tones and pitches. Poor pitch perception would lead to poor vocal singing. In a previous study, samples of singing by normal-hearing children (N = 43) and deaf children with CIs (N = 81) were analyzed acoustically. The present study analyzed those 124 samples with human judgement (i.e., by a musician). The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the correlation between objective measures using acoustic analysis and subjective measures using an adult musician listener. The musician provided scores for each singing sample on several categories of pitch and tempo. The results showed that the children with CIs did well with tempo, but they had trouble singing the correct pitches and the overall listening pleasure was low. Furthermore, the scores of human judgements on pitch direction, pitch consistency, and pitch interval consistency were significantly correlated with the interval deviation computed from the acoustic analyses of the singing samples (with correlation coefficients ranging from 0.541 to 0.624, all p < 0.05).