Music and Language
By Lana Fischer, South Dakota H&V
Where has the time gone?
It does not seem possible that we have two high school seniors at our house this school year: our daughter, Kate, who is deaf and has bilateral cochlear implants, and her twin brother, Justin, who has normal hearing. We didn’t learn about Kate’s hearing until she was three years old. Her mild hearing loss rapidly progressed to severe-to-profound after three months. Kate was implanted on the right at age four, and on the left at age five. Kate has done remarkably well with her cochlear implants. I wish, at the beginning of our journey, I could have had a glimpse of the happy, confident teenage Kate, hanging out at the coffee shop with her friends and playing her flute in the marching band, to reassure me in those early years that all would be well.
One of the aspects of Kate’s hearing loss that I marvel over is her love of music. She enjoys listening to all kinds of music and also plays three musical instruments. Kate streams music through her cochlear implants every chance she gets and knows the lyrics to every song. She also plays flute in the band, in addition to playing violin and viola in the youth orchestra. Kate had early Suzuki music training on the violin beginning at age three which involves attentive listening to music and then playing by ear. I have often wondered how Kate’s musical training has affected her ability to use her cochlear implants for speech and language acquisition in addition to listening in challenging environments.
Unexpected Connections
If music and language share common cognitive processing pathways, to what extent can music training benefit speech and language processing in kids who are deaf/hard of hearing? Music and language share the common characteristics of a complex flow of dynamic sounds organized in a temporal fashion. Both speech and language have different rhythmic levels: phonemes and notes are the short rhythmic units embedded into longer rhythmic units of words and musical phrases. These sounds, both in music and language, must be discriminated and categorized based on pitch, duration and timbre which, in the case of speech/language, lead to phonemic discrimination. Speech in noise is a particularly challenging skill as the listener must use higher level skills of auditory attention, working memory, and auditory scene analysis (the ability to group sound elements from one source and separate it from elements from other sources of sound) to make sense of the sound coming from the speaker. The latter skill, auditory scene analysis, is relied on heavily in ensemble playing when musicians must listen and discriminate the other instruments playing in the musical group, e.g. a string quartet.
There are a few recent, small studies from 2019 and 2020 that have looked specifically at musical training in speech and language acquisition for children who are deaf/hard of hearing and preliminary results appear to show benefit. One study suggests that supervised musical training at an early age improves rhythm perception in children with hearing loss leading to improved perception of speech prosody (patterns of stress and intonation in speech) and phonemic perception. Another study reveals that the distinction of musical instrument timbre developed by musical training leads to better speech perception in noise. And finally, a third study shows that children with cochlear implants who received at least one year of musical training had demonstrated improvement in auditory working memory. These findings are from small studies, but are intriguing and lend support for early musical training for our kids. There are plans for continued research in this area which I eagerly await and look forward to reading.
If interested in learning more, please see the resources below. Note that the second article listed has a list of specific recommendations for musical training for children with hearing loss. ~
Research Articles on Language Acquisition and Musical Training:
Pesnot Lerousseau, Jacques, et al. “Musical Training for Auditory Rehabilitation in Hearing Loss.” Journal of Clinical Medicine, MDPI, 8 Apr. 2020, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7230165/.
Torppa, R; Huotilainen, M; “Why and How Music Can Be Used to Rehabilitate and Develop Speech and Language Skills in Hearing-Impaired Children.” Hearing Research, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2019, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31265971/.
Torppa, Ritva. “Links of Prosodic Stress Perception and Musical Activities… : Ear and Hearing.” LWW, 2020, journals.lww.com/ear-hearing/Fulltext/2020/03000/Links_of_Prosodic_Stress_Perception_and_Musical.18.aspx.
Editor’s note: Fischer is a parent Board member with South Dakota Hands & Voices.
H&V Communicator – Winter 2022