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.

Figures

Figure 1.

Boxplots of the percent correct scores obtained by normal hearing adult listeners attending to the productions by the four talker groups (abscissa). A mean percent correct score was calculated for each talker by averaging scores across all listeners for that talker. The actual mean scores are overlaid on the boxplots as dots. The two sets of mutually offset dots overlaid on the boxplot for children with cochlear implants' (CCI) data correspond to scores from the two listener groups attending to the two subsets of CCIs (Group 1 CCI and Group 2 CCI) who were tested at different times. ACI = adults with cochlear implants; ANH = adults with normal hearing; CNH = children with normal hearing.

Figure 2.

The effect of age at implantation of the child talkers with cochlear implant on the recognition of their emotions by adult listeners with normal hearing. The ordinates in A and B show percent correct scores and rau scores, respectively. Each talker is represented in a different color. The different symbols in the same color show the scores obtained by the different normal hearing listeners attending to each talker's productions. The larger symbols show the mean score computed across all listeners for each talker. For these larger symbols, the different shapes indicate the two groups of talkers (and listeners). The regression line represents a simple regression through the mean scores.

Figure 3.

Boxplots of the mean percent correct scores obtained by normal hearing child listeners attending to the productions by child talkers with normal hearing (CNHs) and cochlear implants (CCIs). The mean scores were computed as the average score obtained across all listeners for each talker's productions. As in Figure 1, the data are overlaid on the boxplots. The two sets of data points overlaid on the CCIs' boxplot indicate the scores obtained by the two groups of listeners attending to the two groups of CCI talkers who were tested at different times.

Figure 4.

The effect of the child talkers with cochlear implants' age at implantation (upper) and the age of the child listeners with normal hearing (lower) on the latter group's ability to identify emotions produced by children with cochlear implants. The ordinates in A and B show percent correct scores and rau scores, respectively. In the upper panels, the abscissa represents the age at implantation. In the lower panels, the abscissa represents the listeners' age. As in Figure 2, in the upper panels, each talker is represented by a different color, and different data points in the same color show scores obtained for that talker by the different listeners. The larger symbols represent the mean score computed across all the talkers. For these larger symbols, the different shapes indicate the two groups of talkers (and listeners). The line shows a simple regression through the mean scores. In the lower panels, each talker is represented by a different (small) symbol, and the pale lines show simple regressions through scores for each talker. The larger symbols show the mean scores obtained by each listener across