title: Acoustic properties of vocal singing in prelingually-deafened children with cochlear implants or hearing aids.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The purpose of the present study was to investigate vocal singing performance of hearing-impaired children with cochlear implants (CI) and hearing aids (HA) as well as to evaluate the relationship between demographic factors of those hearing-impaired children and their singing ability.
  
  
  METHODS
  Thirty-seven prelingually-deafened children with CIs and 31 prelingually-deafened children with HAs, and 37 normal-hearing (NH) children participated in the study. The fundamental frequencies (F0) of each note in the recorded songs were extracted and the duration of each sung note was measured. Five metrics were used to evaluate the pitch-related and rhythm-based aspects of singing accuracy.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Children with CIs and HAs showed significantly poorer performance in either the pitch-based assessments or the rhythm-based measure than the NH children. No significant differences were seen between the CI and HA groups in all of these measures except for the mean deviation of the pitch intervals. For both hearing-impaired groups, length of device use was significantly correlated with singing accuracy.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  There is a marked deficit in vocal singing ability either in pitch or rhythm accuracy in a majority of prelingually-deafened children who have received CIs or fitted with HAs. Although an increased length of device use might facilitate singing performance to some extent, the chance for the hearing-impaired children fitted with either HAs or CIs to reach high proficiency in singing is quite slim.
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Institute of Otology, The Second Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, China.
authors.forename: Yitao
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Mao
authors.forename: Mengchao
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Heather
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Nutter
authors.forename: Yijing
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Qixin
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Qiaoyun
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Weijing
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Dinghua
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Xie
authors.forename: Li
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Xu
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics; D001307:Auditory Perception; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D019929:Cochlear Implantation; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D015331:Cohort Studies; D003638:Deafness / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000628:therapy*; D005260:Female; D006310:Hearing Aids; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000628:therapy*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D011379:Prognosis; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D063346:Singing; D016896:Treatment Outcome; D014833:Voice Quality
keywords: Cochlear implant; Hearing aid; Pediatric; Pitch; Vocal singing