Age-Related Changes in Voice Emotion Recognition by Postlingually Deafened Listeners With Cochlear Implants

Abstract

Objectives: Identification of emotional prosody in speech declines with age in normally hearing (NH) adults. Cochlear implant (CI) users have deficits in the perception of prosody, but the effects of age on vocal emotion recognition by adult postlingually deaf CI users are not known. The objective of the present study was to examine age-related changes in CI users’ and NH listeners’ emotion recognition. Design: Participants included 18 CI users (29.6 to 74.5 years) and 43 NH adults (25.8 to 74.8 years). Participants listened to emotion-neutral sentences spoken by a male and female talker in five emotions (happy, sad, scared, angry, neutral). NH adults heard them in four conditions: unprocessed (full spectrum) speech, 16-channel, 8-channel, and 4-channel noise-band vocoded speech. The adult CI users only listened to unprocessed (full spectrum) speech. Sensitivity (d’) to emotions and Reaction Times were obtained using a single-interval, five-alternative, forced-choice paradigm. Results: For NH participants, results indicated age-related declines in Accuracy and d’, and age-related increases in Reaction Time in all conditions. Results indicated an overall deficit, as well as age-related declines in overall d’ for CI users, but Reaction Times were elevated compared with NH listeners and did not show age-related changes. Analysis of Accuracy scores (hit rates) were generally consistent with d’ data. Conclusions: Both CI users and NH listeners showed age-related deficits in emotion identification. The CI users’ overall deficit in emotion perception, and their slower response times, suggest impaired social communication which may in turn impact overall well-being, particularly so for older CI users, as lower vocal emotion recognition scores have been associated with poorer subjective quality of life in CI patients.

Vocal and musical emotion perception, voice cue discrimination, and quality of life in cochlear implant users with and without acoustic hearing

“…Indeed compared to younger adults, older adults were reported to have lower accuracy in discrimination of F0 contour in both full acoustic (Zaltz & Kishon-Rabin, 2022) and simulated electric hearing degradations (Souza et al, 2011). Considering that older NH and CI adults have also reported lower accuracy in vocal emotion perception (e.g., Cannon & Chatterjee, 2022), perhaps the age-related perceptual changes for both metrics contributed to the association observed in younger NH and CI adults to become weaker.…”

Redefining Success in Adult Cochlear Implant Outcomes

“…Similarly, reliable clinical measures of listening effort are not yet available despite this being a common issue for patients with HL . Lastly, current clinical measures fail to account for listeners’ perception of details of the speech signal such as talker-specific features (eg, sex, age, accent, or dialect) or communicative intent (eg, emotional valence and verbal irony) . As a result, despite improvements in communication being a primary goal for most adult CI recipients, clinical measures of audibility and speech recognition fail to assess numerous communication abilities relevant to everyday life.…”

Linking Affective and Hearing Sciences—Affective Audiology

“…For example, neural-plastic alterations may occur due to long-term hearing deprivation, and manifest as decreased functional connectivity between the amygdala and the auditory cortex, striatum, cingulate gyrus, multimodal processing areas, and frontoparietal control areas ( Tang et al, 2020 ; Xu et al, 2019 ). Thus, deficits in processing vocal emotions may be partially addressed by techniques that target activity in emotion circuits developed in affective science, in conjunction with current amplification interventions ( Cannon & Chatterjee, 2022 ; Goy et al, 2018 ; Paquette et al, 2018 ).…”