Perception of Sung Speech in Bimodal Cochlear Implant Users.
Joseph D Crew, John J Galvin, Qian-Jie Fu
PMID 27837051WHAT IT FOUND
For bimodal CI users, sung speech was much harder to understand than spoken speech, but varying pitch did not worsen it.
Adding the hearing aid improved speech. Melodic pitch fell sharply when different words were sung across notes.
Key findings
01Sentence recognition was much poorer for sung speech than for spoken speech, while varying pitch across words did not significantly reduce performance.
02Melodic contour identification dropped sharply when different words were sung across notes, compared with using the same word.
03The mean combined-device benefit for sentence recognition was 15.5 percentage points over the implant alone and 13.4 percentage points over the better ear.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only Seven adults participated, and their ages, device experience, hearing aid brands, and residual hearing varied widely. Participants were tested with their own clinical device settings, with no control of hearing aid prescription or implant signal processing, so fitting differences may have affected performance. Sentence recognition required all five words in a sentence to be correct for credit, so four out of five words scored as zero and word recognition may be underestimated. Music testing used a narrow pitch range and did not assess emotional response or broader music appreciation. For music, the benefit of adding the implant to the hearing aid was small and not statistically significant, and power was low.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume the combined devices improve melodic pitch over the hearing aid alone. Music performance was largely driven by the hearing aid, and the mean benefit relative to the better ear was 1.9 percentage points; adding the implant to the hearing aid did not produce a significant benefit.