Music and Speech Perception in Children Using Sung Speech.
Yingjiu Nie, John J Galvin, Michael Morikawa and 3 others
PMID 29609496WHAT IT FOUND
In 30 children, musicians did better at recognizing melody shape and sentence recognition in noise than nonmusicians.
Sung speech made sentence recognition in noise worse than spoken speech. This describes perception, not a therapy effect.
Key findings
01Children classified as musicians performed better than nonmusicians on melodic contour identification, with mean differences of 36.0, 24.7, and 30.9 percentage points for piano, fixed timbre, and mixed timbre.
02Sentence recognition in noise was significantly better with naturally spoken speech than with sung speech at fixed or mixed pitch, and musicians were better than nonmusicians in noise but not in quiet.
03Across combined musician and nonmusician age groups, adults were significantly better than young children on melodic contour identification and sentence recognition in quiet, and older children were significantly better than young children on sentence recognition in noise.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included 30 children with normal hearing, so it does not show how children with hearing loss or speech-language disorder would perform. Speech analyses used 24 children in quiet and 29 children in noise because some did not complete all speech tests. Musicians and nonmusicians were not randomly assigned. The musician group had a mean age of 12.1 years and the nonmusician group 10.5 years, and family musicianship was more common in the musician group, so factors other than music training may explain differences. The sung speech and melodic contour stimuli were artificial compared with everyday speech and music, so the results may not match real listening situations. Adult data came from a different study and adults were allowed to repeat stimuli, while children were not, so age comparisons were not perfectly matched.
Declared interests
The study was supported by the CSD Faculty Fund and Ruth Memorial Student Research Grant from JMU, and by NIH. The supplied text does not state other conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that music lessons improve speech perception. The study compared children who already had music training with children who did not, and no training was tested.