Acoustics of Emotional Prosody Produced by Prelingually Deaf Children With Cochlear Implants

Abstract

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.

Development of vocal emotion recognition in school-age children: The EmoHI test for hearing-impaired populations

“…Wiefferink et al (2013) suggested that reduced auditory exposure and language delays may also lead to delayed social-emotional development and reduced conceptual knowledge about emotions, which in turn result in a negative impact on emotion recognition. This is also evidenced by CI children's reduced differences in mean F0 cues and F0 variations in emotion production compared to their NH peers (Chatterjee et al, 2019). The effects of conceptual knowledge on children's discrimination abilities have also been shown earlier, for instance, in research on pitch discrimination (Costa-Giomi & Descombes, 1996).…”

“…The variability was large and covered the entire performance range, which also demonstrates that the EmoHI test can capture a wide range of performances. Besides age, CI children's performance seems to be heavily affected by differences in social-emotional development causing reduced conceptual knowledge on emotions and their properties (Wiefferink et al, 2013;Chatterjee et al, 2019), and differences in their hearing abilities causing perceptual limitations (Nakata, Trehub & Kanda, 2012). For instance, individual differences in CI children's vocal emotion recognition abilities may also rely on their F0 discrimination thresholds, which are generally higher and more variable in CI children compared to NH children (Deroche et al, 2014).…”

Voice Production and Perception

“…In recent years, many individuals with hearing impairments receive cochlear implants (CI). CIs provide little pitch information but do provide other cues, such as duration and intensity (Chatterjee et al, 2019). CI users typically experience difficulties in perceiving emotional prosody (e.g., Chatterjee et al, 2015;Hopyan-Misakyan et al, 2009;Paquette et al, 2018), and identifying producers' sex or identity (e.g., Fu et al, 2005;Fuller et al, 2014;Mühler et al, 2009).…”

Effects of a prosody rehabilitation program on expression of affect in preschool children with hearing impairment: a randomized trial

“…Several suprasegmental deficits are characteristic of the speech of the hearing-impaired particularly prosodic control of intonation and stress [12,13]. Regarding affective prosody production, some studies showed that CI children produce emotions with a limited range of f0 and intensity with little contrasts between different emotions in addition to an imprecise imitation of emotions due to inappropriate pitch inflection and an overall monotonous speech [14,15].…”