The meaning of music in the rehabilitation of children with hearing impairment

We review the possible mechanisms by which music may enhance the evelopment of spoken language, and report preliminary results from our studies with cochlear implant (CI) children. One important finding in these studies is a connection of exposure to parental singing with better ability to perceive contrastive focus and stress in speech. Our preliminary conclusions are that being sung to maintains the child’s attention for extended periods, and that the larger differences in pitch, intensity and duration in song in comparison to speech may help direct attention towards cues in song that also have a role in the perception of speech prosody. This may be of crucial importance for children with hearing impairment, because it may help them to segment the continuous speech stream into words and thus enhance learning of spoken language. Thus, music seems able to play animportant part in the rehabilitation of children with hearing impairment.Peer reviewe