Music Helps Spoken Language Development For Children With Impaired Hearing

A new study from the University of Helsinki has found that music, in particular singing, is beneficial to the brain of children with hearing impairment, and the development of their spoken language.

Ritva Torppa, a university Lecturer of Logopedics and Speech Therapist, and Professor Minna Huotilainen have published their findings together with those made by other researchers in a comprehensive paper called “Why and how music can be used to rehabilitate and develop speech and language skills in hearing-impaired children” published by Hearing Research.

This paper is a comprehensive review of the reasons why music could and should be used for improving the speech and language skills of children with mild to severe hearing impairments with cochlear implants and/or hearing aids, and contains a series of ten guidelines by Torppa and Huotilainen for the use of music with children of different ages and varying backgrounds for parents, caregivers, educators and therapists.

These recommendations can be found in section 3 of the paper, sub-titled How to use music to enhance speech and language skills of hearing-impaired children. Emphasis is placed on the value of using singing as your main instrument, especially with a young child, and the benefit of supporting the musical hobbies of teenagers with hearing impairments. The recommendations are made on the basis of the intervention studies and correlational studies described in the article, and on the basis of the traditional auditory rehabilitation, music therapy methodologies, and speech and language therapy methods.

“…the current evidence seems enough to urge speech therapists, music therapists, music teachers, parents, and children and adolescents with hearing impairments and/or cochlear implants to start using music for enhancing speech and language skills. For this reason, we give our recommendations on how to use music for language skill enhancement in this group.” – Rita Torppa and Minna Huotilaienen

Read the full article here: Hearing Research. doi:10.1016/j.heares.2019.06.003

–Deb Carveth, online editor for Community Music Victoria
Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash