Children with hearing impairment: conversational temporal skills and rhythmic training

Children with hearing impairment: conversational temporal skills and rhythmic training

Céline Hidalgo1, 2, Simone Falk3, Noël Nguyen1, and Daniele Schön2

1. Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-Marseille University, France

2. Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes, Aix-Marseille University, France

3. Institut de Philologie allemande, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet, Munich, Allemagne

Children with Hearing Impairment (HI) educated in an oral environment display conversational difficulties in spite of good results at standard language assessments. In two studies, we test the hypothesis that these difficulties could be due to an alteration of temporal skills and predictive coding. More precisely, we hypothesize that 30 minutes of active musical rhythmic training will improve the accuracy of conversational turns. To this end, we designed a task wherein the child has to name pictures in alternation with a virtual partner. In a first study, we manipulated the speed and regularity of the turns and measured the effect of rhythmic training on the accuracy and regularity of children’s responses. Results show that the rhythmic training improves the sensitivity of children with HI to the temporal variations of the alternation. In a second study, we manipulated the speech rate of the virtual partner and also measured EEG. We will present the analyses bridging the neural sensitivity to perceptual deviance (here a MMN to temporally deviant trials), the ability to converge to different speech rates and the accuracy in taking the turns. Finally we will show to what extent a short rhythmic training can influence these different skills.