Singing Proficiency of Members of a Choir Formed by Prelingually Deafened Children With Cochlear Implants.

The sample was very small: 10 children with cochlear implants and 8 normal-hearing children. The choir members were selected by convenience because their families could commit to travel and time, not by measured singing or speech ability. There was no randomised comparison and no pretraining singing data from the choir, so the study cannot show that music training caused the high proficiency. The children received several supports together: prior speech-language rehabilitation, weekly group music training, daily speech training by caregivers, and daily home practice supervised by caregivers with volunteer online tutorials. The normal-hearing controls were trained differently: they had only 2 weeks of individual training on the target song, while the choir members had 21 months of intensive training. The comparison with earlier cochlear implant groups used different songs and different analysis conditions, so some of the difference may be due to method rather than training. The study measured singing output only; it did not measure music perception, pitch perception, tone perception, speech perception, academic performance, or self-esteem. The hearing aid, age, and implant-timing associations are based on very small numbers and were reported with caution.

The study was supported, in part, by an NIH grant. The supplied text does not report author conflicts.

Do not conclude that singing training alone caused the children's high proficiency or that it will improve hearing, speech, or school performance. The children also received prior speech-language rehabilitation, daily speech training, caregiver-supervised home practice, and volunteer online tutorials, and the study had no randomised control or perceptual outcomes.