Patent Application
20170046973
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1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the fields of education and music therapy, particularly to systems and methods for, and process of, preparing and applying musical compositions, and use of such compositions to treat and educate individuals with various disorders, which manifest as language impairments.
2. Background and Related Art
Communication disorders include problems related to speech, language and auditory processing. In the US, nearly 6 million children under the age of 18 have a speech or language disorder. Twenty five to 40% of children on the autism spectrum do not develop phrase speech during their lifetime, despite access to early intensive interventions. Almost all treatment approaches for autism are based mostly on social skill training and behavior modification, and rely exclusively on a top-down, direct instructional approach, with no targeting of core neuronal deficits underlying language impairments.
The development of the auditory system necessary for language acquisition begins with exposure to the sound environment before the baby is born, and continues into adolescence. Developing the ability to efficiently process auditory information, which includes building the capacity for working memory, is a prerequisite for spoken language acquisition. Auditory cognition is a set of processes by which the brain makes sense of the sound world. These processes require several brain networks to work together: auditory scene analysis, complex sound perception, visual cues, attention, auditory working memory, long-term memory, and emotional systems. The lack of language development in children should never create the automatic assumption that these children cannot learn, particularly when auditory cognition has not been addressed in interventions and education. Without learning to communicate and participate in society, these children become adults requiring lifelong round-the-clock care, leading to a poor quality of life.
Speech sounds are complex sounds. The comprehension of speech requires an ability to distinguish between different arrangements of components of sounds, including to determine spectral shape, detect and discriminate loudness and pitch, and to do so with fine temporal resolution, which addresses both longer vowels and shorter consonants. These processes require access to basic sound features, as well as detection of changes in these properties over time; speech comprehension involves higher-order tasks like forming auditory objects, localizing sounds, understanding speech, or perceiving music. It involves mapping continuous acoustic waveforms onto discrete phonological units computed to store words in the mental lexicon.
Auditory discrimination skills play a fundamental role in development of speaking, reading, language, and more complex auditory processes. Pitch contour recognition has been shown to be critically important in the acquisition of literacy as being a part of the acoustic foundation of phonological skills. The rapid auditory processing abilities of infants have been shown to be the single best predictor of language outcome at 24 months of age (Abramson and Lloyd 2016). It is therefore very important that a child has basic frequency and other sound feature discrimination skills necessary to organize the temporal and spectral aspects of the stream of speech, and associate various patterns to meaningful percepts of objects and events, before spoken language learning can become efficient by any behavioral or social skill interventions currently available.
While inefficient auditory cognition affects communication and literacy learning in numerous health conditions to various degrees, like speech and reading impairments, including dyslexia and cochlear implant rehabilitation, impaired language constitutes the hallmark feature in autism, which is one of the core domains particularly affected. Concerns related to language development are the primary reason parents seek professional help for children with autism. Receptive language deficits have been shown to be present during the first year of life. In numerous recent imaging and electrophysiologic studies, atypical auditory development has been proposed as diagnostic for autism spectrum disorders, and prognostic in terms of severity. Basic perceptual processing has been found to be delayed in both visual and auditory domains. However, higher levels of processing, including lexical-semantic functions, have been found truly impaired. Disruption in initial acoustic processing is thought to be responsible for impaired phonological processing, which is critical for efficient language development.
The first year is a foundational developmental period for acoustic feature encoding and mapping sounds to meaning—a foundation for language learning. Behaviorally, children with autism do not naturally orient to speech stimuli like other children, and therefore, do not engage fully in a natural language acquisition process. Without paying attention and showing interest in spoken language, which includes interaction and engagement, spoken language cannot develop. Importantly, typically developing infants do not respond to just any kind of speech; they prefer infant-directed speech, which is exaggerated musical speech used by mothers and caretakers. They do not understand linguistic meaning, but respond to pitch and rhythmic contours, timbre, or spectral shape; they learn to extract these patterns from auditory scene, and attach meaning to these. Infants do not learn language by building up from phonemes. They build up language by mapping sound patterns to meaning. The smallest linguistic entity with meaning is a word. Phonemes can change meanings of words, but they do not represent objects or events.
Currently available early intervention methods do not lead to language development for at least every third child on the autism spectrum. These methods encourage social interaction, but are not designed to build capacity for auditory cognitive skills necessary for understanding speech. None of these programs address auditory object formation, the fundamental perceptual unit in hearing. When children with minimal language reach school age, they become one of the most highly undeserved and understudied populations of children. They do not respond to existing language teaching methods and therefore cannot access literacy learning, despite for the fact that at least 50% of these children have nonverbal intelligence within normal limits. The lack of interventions is highlighted in the recent study by Krueger (2013) across several school districts in California, where children were found to be unengaged for most of their time at school, despite having low adult/child ratios and various specialists, including behavioral, speech, and occupational therapists on the team. Also, a subset of children with cochlear implants fail to achieve an open-set speech recognition, even after five years past implantation, due to slow auditory skill development, leading to slow development of language, reading, and academic skills. A clear and urgent need exists for an intervention model to be employed in teaching children who fail to develop functional language, so that every child with nonverbal intelligence levels can achieve literacy, and/or whose language skills would benefit from enhancing auditory cognition.
The principal objective of the invention uses an intervention model to provide a method (both system and process) that combines elements of language with elements of music, using various media in various settings (including but not limited to apps, sheet music, music lessons, speech therapy, occupational therapy, preschools, schools, and home use) to enhance and support teaching language/vocabulary to people of all ages with language impairments, those needing to sharpen auditory cognitive skills, and particularly young children with nonverbal intelligence within normal limits who do not respond to existing early intensive behavioral and social skill interventions in terms of language outcome. This intervention also targets individuals with other communication disorders, cochlear implant recipients, posttraumatic stress disorder, brain trauma, stroke, and those needing to improve foreign language acquisition through enhanced auditory decoding skills. The intervention model provides instructional media, including instructive components that are portable, simple, and non-confusing.
The theoretical basis for the invention model is based on knowledge from: (1) infant research on how language develops during the first year of life; (2) neuroscience and psychology studies showing that music and language share cognitive and neural systems; that musical and language stimuli activate the same areas in the brain; and that both rely on auditory modality, perception, and production of a sound; (3) imaging and electrophysiology studies on autism and other neurodevelopmental and language disorders suggesting that auditory processing difficulties are central in language impairments. Many of these studies have called for including music in interventions.
The invention employs multimodal interaction as a way to target the components of language acquisition that take place during the first year(s) of life in typically developing infants, and to enhance and support receptive language acquisition and literacy learning in children with various disorders affecting language, particularly in autism and cochlear implant recipients by: (1) building differentiation skills to acoustic features of spoken words like pitch contour, rhythm contour, and spectral shape using shared features between spoken language and music; (2) mapping musical sound patterns onto meanings; (3) supporting auditory object formation; (4) building capacity for working memory; (5) using general nonlinguistic auditory processing before linguistic meaning; (6) include affective components of music to draw attention and interest.
The focus of the invention—the intervention model—is on the multimodal interaction targeting non-phonemic features of spoken language that support various language functions. This includes extracting meaningful sounds from the auditory scene, phonological processing, which naturally develops through interactions between mother and infant during the first year of life, such as pitch, infra-pitch/rhythm, timbre, prosody, patterns, accents, and sequences, and learning about the structure of language. The non-phonemic features of spoken language segments are presented as musical stimuli in relation to visual objects, to be analyzed at both basic and higher order auditory and audiovisual processing levels, and which support and enhance the receptive language acquisition. In addition, the intervention model provides a specific way to enhance cognitive development in nonverbal or minimally verbal individuals without language skills, who cannot use language for developing thinking skills and problem solving capacity.
One of the basic elements of the invention is the system for creating musical representations of spoken words from basic vocabulary. The system provides the means to combine composing, configuring, and creating predetermined forms of musical representations of spoken words in a way that can be used for expanding language from basic vocabulary to word combinations and phrases. Prerecorded musical word representations encourage differentiation and recognition of a high variety of spectral shapes. These are then associated with visual objects by use of various musical instruments (including acoustic violin, which has the closest acoustic properties to human voice) to provide the complexity of natural rich sounds to be decoded, considering that speech sounds are highly complex and variable. Musical representations of spoken words include syllabic rhythm and accents of each corresponding word with which they are paired. Pairing music compositions with visual objects supports formation of auditory objects and symbolic thinking, and helps connect visual objects with written words.
The intervention model enables children with limited language to become meaningfully engaged in multimodal activities that encourage development of auditory cognition and cognition generally without the need for preexisting language knowledge. It uses music, which children are naturally drawn to, to encourage connections between auditory and several forms of visual information; to help them learn to differentiate and recognize objects by auditory information; to compare and categorize this information by spectral shape, pitch contour, and rhythm contour; to memorize and retrieve from memory; and to form auditory objects as symbols representing objects. The intervention model engages both primary and higher order auditory processing simultaneously, in the form of play and problem solving, and encourages children to make a connection with basic reading activities.
The objects and features of the present invention will become more fully apparent from the following description and appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings. Understanding that these drawings depict only typical embodiments of the invention and are, therefore, not to be considered limiting of its scope, the invention will be described and explained with additional detail through use of the accompanying drawings:
The invention is a method that includes a system and process of multimodal intervention. It combines elements of language with elements of music, using various media in various settings (including but not limited to apps, sheet music, music lessons, speech therapy, occupational therapy, preschools and schools, home use) to enhance and support teaching language/vocabulary/word combinations/sentences to people of all ages with language impairments, and/or those in need of sharpening auditory cognitive skills, particularly young children with nonverbal intelligence within normal limits who do not respond to existing early intensive behavioral and social skill interventions in terms of language outcome. The intervention also targets individuals with other communication disorders, cochlear implant recipients, posttraumatic stress disorder, brain trauma, stroke, and those needing to improve foreign language acquisition through enhanced auditory decoding skills. The intervention model provides instructional media including instructive components that are portable, simple, and non-confusing, and enables engagement by individuals who cannot use language for communication.
The invention employs multimodal interaction as a way to target components of language acquisition that, in typically developing infants, take place during the first year(s) of life, and without which receptive language learning is not fully achievable. The intervention model enables an individual with or without language impairment to enhance and support the receptive language acquisition and literacy by: (1) building differentiation skills to acoustic features of spoken words like pitch contour, rhythm contour, and spectral shape using shared features between spoken language and music; (2) mapping musical sound patterns onto meanings; (3) supporting auditory object formation; (4) building capacity for working memory; (5) using general nonlinguistic auditory processing before linguistic meaning; (6) including affective components of music to draw attention and interest; (7) to extract meaningful sounds from the auditory scene.
The focus of the intervention model is the non-phonemic features of spoken language, which support various language functions. These include phonological processing, which naturally develops through interactions between mother and infant during the first year of life, such as pitch, infra-pitch/rhythm, timbre, prosody, patterns, accents, and sequences. These are presented systematically as specially composed and configured musical stimuli in relation to visual objects, to be identified and analyzed at both basic and higher order auditory and audiovisual processing levels, and which support and enhance receptive language acquisition. In addition, the intervention model provides a specific way to enhance cognitive development in nonverbal or minimally verbal individuals without language skills, who cannot use language to develop thinking skills and problem solving capacity.
The core of the invention is the system for creating compositions of musical representations of spoken words from basic vocabulary, word combinations, and phrases. Music is used instead of words because individuals with language impairments, particularly nonverbal or minimally verbal children, do not have efficient auditory cognition enabling them to process complex sounds of speech, but they are able respond to music (similar to infant language development, where musical aspects of language/prosody are first identified and analyzed). The system provides a way to compose, configure, and create both undetermined and predetermined forms of musical representations of spoken words in a way that includes non-phonemic features of spoken words. When these are combined, they can be used meaningfully for expanding language from basic vocabulary to word combinations and phrases. The musical representations of spoken words include syllabic rhythm and accents of each corresponding word with which they are paired. Each musical representation of a corresponding word has a first pitch, dependent on the number of syllables. The compositions take account multiple acoustic features: pitch contour, frequency range of speech of various speakers, rhythmic contour, tempo elements, loudness/volume dynamics, spectral shape variety or timbre, accents, extraction of meaningful information form the auditory scene. Vocabulary category, melodic and rhythmic contours, and accents are matched with the prosody of the spoken word/word combination/phrase. Pairing these music compositions with visual objects supports formation of auditory objects and symbolic thinking, and helps to connect visual objects with written words.
Prerecorded musical word representations in apps and other electronic media encourage differentiation and recognition of a high variety of spectral shapes. These are associated with visual objects by use of various musical instruments for recording (including acoustic violin, which has the closest acoustic properties compared to the human voice) to provide complexity of natural rich sounds to be decoded, considering that speech sounds are highly complex and variable. Sheet music for basic vocabulary, word combinations, and phrases provides a way to use the intervention model in music education and music therapy to enhance language acquisition in multimodal naturalistic settings.
The intervention model enables children with limited language to become meaningfully engaged in multimodal activities that encourage development of auditory cognition, and cognition generally, without the need for preexisting language knowledge. The model uses music, which children are naturally drawn to, to encourage connections between auditory information and several forms of visual information; to help them learn to differentiate and recognize objects by auditory information; to compare and categorize this information by spectral shape, pitch contour, and rhythm contour; to memorize and retrieve from memory; and to form auditory objects as symbols representing objects. The ability to extract meaningful sounds from auditory scene and cognitive skills, including comparison, categorization, pattern-finding, and introduction of symbolic thinking, are developed through exploration of specifically designed musical compositions. In these compositions, pitch contour, rhythm, and accents of spoken language segments—words, phrases, sentences—are incorporated into specially composed elemental music segments and presented in a way that audiovisual, tactile, proprioceptive, and motor functions are simultaneously employed during the completion of tasks. The intervention model engages both primary and higher order auditory processing simultaneously, in the form of play and problem solving, and encourages children to make a connection with basic reading activities.
Vocabulary is introduced by categories, e.g., animals, fruits and vegetables, house, colors, verbs, numbers, word combinations, phrases, sentences, etc. Instead of an actual spoken word, a corresponding elemental musical expression segment is composed, so that a perceptual unit, an auditory object can be formed. The pitch of the first note is dependent on the number of syllables of that particular word. Rhythm and accents match the syllabic rhythm and accents of the spoken word; various sound frequencies using a variety of musical instruments are employed for both auditory contrast and to match speaking frequencies of spoken language by gender. First, auditory complex signals are presented with different timbres and played by different musical instruments to enable easier acoustic differentiation. Visual cues are used for certain tasks, which will be later faded to promote only auditory analysis. Step by step, the musical compositions become more similar and harder to discriminate. Visual objects are presented simultaneously with corresponding musical compositions. For audiovisual processing, the visual effects are employed for the duration of auditory stimuli to draw attention to the sound—object connection. The associations between musical representations of spoken words and visual objects will be used later to include spoken word, and introduce reading via written word/musical representation of spoken word/visual object associations.
Invention used in apps and other electronic media:
By arranging objects according to the hierarchy of word complexity, starting from the high acoustic feature and syllabic contrasts and decreasing these gradually, encourages auditory perception and cognition development necessary for understanding complex speech sounds and their combinations. After the associations of musical representations of spoken words have been made with visual objects, and auditory objects representing these visual objects formed, the same associations are used to switch from a visual picture object to a visual written word object. This allows reading to be introduced at the same time as learning basic vocabulary, the skill which enables access to literacy and information regardless of the developmental level of speech.
Invention in music lessons, music therapy, or other educational settings: touching of the screen is replaced with touching and replacing actual toys or pictures of objects, or, later, written word cards from one location to another and pressing piano or keyboard keys, or playing the violin instead of dragging objects on the screen. The principle is the same: forming musical auditory objects for spoken words, playing them on an instrument, and recognizing objects by music segments containing syllabic rhythm, and accents of corresponding spoken words of these objects.
The intervention model enables children with limited language to become meaningfully engaged in multimodal activities that encourage development of auditory cognition and cognition generally without the need for preexisting language knowledge. It uses music, which children are naturally drawn to, to encourage connections between auditory and several forms of visual information; to help them learn to differentiate and recognize objects by auditory information; to compare and categorize this information by spectral shape, pitch contour, and rhythm contour; to memorize and retrieve from memory; and to form auditory objects as symbols representing objects. The intervention model engages both primary and higher order auditory processing simultaneously, in the form of play and problem solving, and encourages children to make a connection with basic reading activities.
This application claims the benefit of the following U.S. Provisional Patent Application 62/246,888 Oct. 27, 2015 Kuddo
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 62246888 | Oct 2015 | US |
