Impact of Auditory-Motor Musical Training on Melodic Pattern Recognition in Cochlear Implant Users

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.

Prospective cohort study.

Tertiary academic center.

Fifteen postlingually deafened adults with CIs.

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.

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.

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.

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.