Postersession 2
Poster #: 41
Topic: Development (infancy, childhood, adolescence, and aging)
Thursday, Sep 10, 2015
14:30-16:00
1st floor
Perception of musical features in hearing impaired children after cochlear implantation
1Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences / Saxonian Cochlear Implant Center, University Hospital Dresden, Germany
2Saxonian Cochlear Implant Center, University Hospital Dresden, Dresden, Germany
niki.vavatzanidis@uniklinikum-dresden.de
Cochlear implantation is by now an established procedure that gives hearing impaired children access to the auditory world. Yet, we still know little about the auditory features that hearing impaired children actually perceive in the months following cochlear implantation and thus, on what means they have to process sound, speech and music. In previous MMN studies we focused on the perception of vowel length (Vavatzanidis et al., under review) and syllable stress pattern (Vavatzanidis et al., in preparation) right after cochlear implantion as they are important abilities for language acquisition. In the following study we turned to more basic auditory features that nevertheless are also crucial for music perception. We applied an adapted version of the musical multi-feature mismatch paradigm by Vuust et al. (2011) that tests pitch, timbre, intensity, rhythm and slide perception. With it, we tested 16 prelingually deaf children (9 girls; mean age at implant activation: 17 months, range: 7-39 months) at six and twelve months after they received a cochlear implant. First results show that timbre deviations are well perceived by the children after a year’s experience of hearing, thus showing auditory sensitivity to basic musical features despite their delayed hearing onset.