How Vocal Emotions Produced by Children With Cochlear Implants Are Perceived by Their Hearing Peers

Abstract

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.

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

“…Differences in the prosody of read or scripted speech as opposed to spontaneous speech have been reported in the literature (Laan, 1997). Although Damm et al (2019) found that these methods evoked highly identifiable emotions in the CNH, ANH, and ACI groups, the differences between laboratory-recorded and naturally spoken emotional speech may further modify the group differences observed here. These limitations should be addressed in future studies.…”

“…In a recent investigation (Damm et al, 2019), the identifiability of these identical recordings made by the same participants was measured by asking normally hearing child and adult listeners to indicate whether each recording sounded happy or sad. In contrast to the normally hearing talkers and the postlingually deaf adult talkers, the CCI group’s recordings showed deficits in how well their recorded emotions were identified.…”

“…The deficits observed in the CCI in the present study with these highly contrastive emotions may underestimate the true nature of the deficit when more subtle emotions are to be communicated through prosodic cues in speech. A study investigating how well these participants’ recordings were heard as happy or sad by normally hearing listeners (Damm et al, 2019) showed strong variability among the CCI talkers. Although some were very well understood, others’ emotions were mislabeled more frequently.…”

“…The list of materials used for this study is comprised of 20 simple sentences that had no overt semantic cues about emotion. These sentences are provided in Table 2 (identical to Table 2 in Damm et al, 2019, JSLHR). The sentences were simple enough that the youngest participants (as young as 6 years of age) could read them aloud easily.…”

Higher Right Hemisphere Gamma Band Lateralization and Suggestion of a Sensitive Period for Vocal Auditory Emotional Stimuli Recognition in Unilateral Cochlear Implant Children: An EEG Study

“…CI children are a paradigmatic model for the study of emotion recognition skills, as due to the early acquisition of deafness, they learned language through the degraded input of the CI, which greatly affects harmonic pitch perception. This ability is strongly necessary for emotion recognition in voices, and its deficiency could have implications on how child CI users learn to produce vocal emotions ( Damm et al, 2019 ). However, a very recent study provided evidence that also deaf people can develop skills for emotional vocalizations despite the presence of some differences in comparison to NH adults ( Sauter et al, 2019 ).…”