Child implant users' imitation of happy- and sad-sounding speech

Abstract

Cochlear implants have enabled many congenitally or prelingually deaf children to acquire their native language and communicate successfully on the basis of electrical rather than acoustic input. Nevertheless, degraded spectral input provided by the device reduces the ability to perceive emotion in speech. We compared the vocal imitations of 5- to 7-year-old deaf children who were highly successful bilateral implant users with those of a control sample of children who had normal hearing. First, the children imitated several happy and sad sentences produced by a child model. When adults in Experiment 1 rated the similarity of imitated to model utterances, ratings were significantly higher for the hearing children. Both hearing and deaf children produced poorer imitations of happy than sad utterances because of difficulty matching the greater pitch modulation of the happy versions. When adults in Experiment 2 rated electronically filtered versions of the utterances, which obscured the verbal content, ratings of happy and sad utterances were significantly differentiated for deaf as well as hearing children. The ratings of deaf children, however, were significantly less differentiated. Although deaf children's utterances exhibited culturally typical pitch modulation, their pitch modulation was reduced relative to that of hearing children. One practical implication is that therapeutic interventions for deaf children could expand their focus on suprasegmental aspects of speech perception and production, especially intonation patterns.

Voice emotion perception and production in cochlear implant users

“…Acoustic voice quality in CI children is generally better than that of hearing aid users (Guerrero Lopez, et al, 2013); however, there remain significant impairments in emotion production in the CI population. Studies report less accurate imitations of happy- and sad-sounding speech among CI children compared to NH children, particularly with regard to appropriate pitch modulation (Wang, et al, 2013). Furthermore, CI children demonstrate difficulty with perceiving more subtle emotions such as disappointment and surprise (Nakata, et al, 2012).…”

“…There is large inter-individual variability in speech prosody perception and production skills. In fact, many studies report a handful of “star” CI performers whose abilities are reportedly on par with their NH peers (Wang, et al, 2013; Chatterjee, et al, 2015). A myriad of factors contributes to variability in speech prosody skills including auditory deprivation prior to implantation, age at implantation, and technological factors.…”

Voice emotion recognition by cochlear-implanted children and their normally-hearing peers

“…This suggests that children listening through CIs are able to establish firm concepts of emotion fairly early. However, studies to date indicate that voice emotion recognition by cCI remains significantly poorer than their normally hearing peers (Most & Aviner, 2009; Wang et al, 2013; Ketelaar et al, 2012; Volkova et al, 2013). Nakata et al (2012) found that imitative voice emotion production scores of Japanese cCI aged 5–13 years were significantly poorer than cNHs’ and correlated with their voice emotion perception scores.…”

Deficits in the sensitivity to pitch sweeps by school-aged children wearing cochlear implants

“…English-speaking CI children had difficulties differentiating between a question and a statement, both in terms of perception and in terms of production (Peng et al, 2008). CI children also display considerable deficits in recognizing emotion in voice (Most and Aviner, 2009;Ketelaar et al, 2012;Nakata et al, 2012;Volkova et al, 2013;Wang et al, 2013;Chatterjee et al, 2015). To summarize, it is clear that CI children suffer both from poor pitch sensitivity and difficulties with pitch-dominant cues in speech perception tasks, but the causality between the two remains to be substantiated, which was the goal of the subsequent section.…”