Teaching Conditional Relations between Music Progressions and Faces for Child Cochlear Implant Users

Research results indicate that the relationship between music and emotions in children with hearing loss and cochlear implant users is considerably impaired, however the development of this skill could improve, to some extent, the identifying the emotional content of speech itself. In this sense, the present study aimed to teach the relations between the acoustic characteristics of musical excerpts and their respective emotional aspects to child cochlear implant users. To this purpose, eight children performed a four-step matching-to-sample (MTS) protocol in which this ability was tested and trained. In Step 1, participants learned to relate the dictated phrases "Point to Happy face" and "Point to Sad face" conditionally (in Portuguese) to happy and sad faces. In Step 2, it was tested whether participants could conditionally relate major and minor tonalities excerpts to happy or sad faces, respectively, even before exposure to the training protocols. In Step 3, children were taught to conditionally relate major and minor progressions to happy and sad faces, respectively. Finally, in Step 4, it was tested whether the proposed conditional training could provide any change in the discriminatory repertoire of child cochlear implant users with a new set of musical excerpts. In general, the results indicated that child cochlear implant users presented a statistically significant increase in their performances between Step 2 (pretest) and Step 4 (posttest). However, the performances were close to the level of chance for most participants in the Step 3 training blocks. In light of these results, evaluating other teaching procedures in future studies was suggested, such as fading and go/no-go procedures.