Objective: Cochlear implant (CI) users struggle with tasks of pitch-based prosody perception. Pitch pattern recognition is vital for both music comprehension and understanding the prosody of speech, which signals emotion and intent. Research in normal-hearing individuals shows that auditory-motor training, in which participants produce the auditory pattern they are learning, is more effective than passive auditory training. We investigated whether auditory-motor training of CI users improves complex sound perception, such as vocal emotion recognition and pitch pattern recognition, compared with purely auditory training.
Study design: Prospective cohort study.
Setting: Tertiary academic center.
Patients: Fifteen postlingually deafened adults with CIs.
Intervention(s): Participants were divided into 3 one-month training groups: auditory-motor (intervention), auditory-only (active control), and no training (control). Auditory-motor training was conducted with the "Contours" software program and auditory-only training was completed with the "AngelSound" software program.
Main outcome measure: Pre and posttest examinations included tests of speech perception (consonant-nucleus-consonant, hearing-in-noise test sentence recognition), speech prosody perception, pitch discrimination, and melodic contour identification.
Results: Participants in the auditory-motor training group performed better than those in the auditory-only and no-training (p < 0.05) for the melodic contour identification task. No significant training effect was noted on tasks of speech perception, speech prosody perception, or pitch discrimination.
Conclusions: These data suggest that short-term auditory-motor music training of CI users impacts pitch pattern recognition. This study offers approaches for enriching the world of complex sound in the CI user.