Purpose: Cochlear implants (CIs) provide reasonable levels of speech recognition quietly, but voice pitch perception is severely impaired in CI users. The central question addressed here relates to how access to acoustic input pre-implantation influences vocal emotion production by individuals with CIs. The objective of this study was to compare acoustic characteristics of vocal emotions produced by prelingually deaf school-aged children with cochlear implants (CCIs) who were implanted at the age of 2 and had no usable hearing before implantation with those produced by children with normal hearing (CNH), adults with normal hearing (ANH), and postlingually deaf adults with cochlear implants (ACI) who developed with good access to acoustic information prior to losing their hearing and receiving a CI. Method: A set of 20 sentences without lexically based emotional information was recorded by 13 CCI, 9 CNH, 9 ANH, and 10 ACI, each with a happy emotion and a sad emotion, without training or guidance. The sentences were analyzed for primary acoustic characteristics of the productions. Results: Significant effects of Emotion were observed in all acoustic features analyzed (mean voice pitch, standard deviation of voice pitch, intensity, duration, and spectral centroid). ACI and ANH did not differ in any of the analyses. Of the four groups, CCI produced the smallest acoustic contrasts between the emotions in voice pitch and emotions in its standard deviation. Effects of developmental age (highly correlated with the duration of device experience) and age at implantation (moderately correlated with duration of device experience) were observed, and interactions with the children's sex were also observed. Conclusion: Although prelingually deaf CCI and postlingually deaf ACI are listening to similar degraded speech and show similar deficits in vocal emotion perception, these groups are distinct in their productions of contrastive vocal emotions. The results underscore the importance of access to acoustic hearing in early childhood for the production of speech prosody and also suggest the need for a greater role of speech therapy in this area.
Purpose Cochlear implants (CIs) transmit a degraded version of the acoustic input to the listener. This impacts the perception of harmonic pitch, resulting in deficits in the perception of voice features critical to speech prosody. Such deficits may relate to changes in how children with CIs (CCIs) learn to produce vocal emotions. The purpose of this study was to investigate happy and sad emotional speech productions by school-age CCIs, compared to productions by children with normal hearing (NH), postlingually deaf adults with CIs, and adults with NH. Method All individuals recorded the same emotion-neutral sentences in a happy manner and a sad manner. These recordings were then used as stimuli in an emotion recognition task performed by child and adult listeners with NH. Their performance was taken as a measure of how well the 4 groups of talkers communicated the 2 emotions. Results Results showed high variability in the identifiability of emotions produced by CCIs, relative to other groups. Some CCIs produced highly identifiable emotions, while others showed deficits. The postlingually deaf adults with CIs produced highly identifiable emotions and relatively small intersubject variability. Age at implantation was found to be a significant predictor of performance by CCIs. In addition, the NH listeners' age predicted how well they could identify the emotions produced by CCIs. Thus, older NH child listeners were better able to identify the CCIs' intended emotions than younger NH child listeners. In contrast to the deficits in their emotion productions, CCIs produced highly intelligible words in the sentences carrying the emotions. Conclusions These results confirm previous findings showing deficits in CCIs' productions of prosodic cues and indicate that early auditory experience plays an important role in vocal emotion productions by individuals with CIs.
Informative cues for vocal emotions in speech include voice characteristics, speaking rate and intensity. For listeners with cochlear implants, voice characteristics such as pitch and vocal tract length are weakly represented in the electric signal; intensity cues are weakly to moderately preserved, and speaking rate is well represented. Our studies indicate that school-age children (6–18 years of age) with cochlear implants have significant deficits in their recognition of vocal emotions relative to normally hearing peers, similar to post-lingually deaf adults with cochlear implants. However, in contrast to the post-lingually deaf adults, children with cochlear implants showed large deficits in their productions of vocal emotions (happy/sad contrasts), measured in 1) acoustic analyses of the produced speech and 2) normally hearing listeners’ perceptions of the produced emotions. In contrast to emotions, the words and sentences produced by the children with cochlear implants were highly intelligible. Post-lingually deaf adults with cochlear implants, however, showed excellent performance in the voice emotion production task. These results suggest that the perception of vocal emotions by listeners with cochlear implants may be limited primarily by device limitations, while emotion productions in speech are shaped more strongly by early auditory experience.
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