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.
Highlights
Emotional communication is a key element of social development, social cognition, and emotional well-being
The present study focused on acoustic analyses, while other studies have investigated the intelligibility of the emotional productions
The findings suggest a key role of access to acoustic information during development for the production of prosodic cues
Summary
Emotional communication is a key element of social development, social cognition, and emotional well-being. Studies have shown that in children and adults with cochlear implants (CIs), performance in vocal emotion recognition tasks predicts their self-perceived quality of life, but their general speech recognition does not (Schorr et al, 2009; Luo et al, 2018) This indicates that speech emotion communication is a critical area of deficit in CIs that needs to be addressed. CIs do not represent voice pitch to the listener with adequate fidelity, but other cues to vocal emotions, such as intensity and duration cues, are retained in the electric input These deficits in vocal pitch perception have been implicated in CI users’ poorer performance in pitchdominant areas of speech perception such as prosody or lexical tones (Peng et al, 2004, 2008, 2017; Green et al, 2005; Chatterjee and Peng, 2008; See et al, 2013; Deroche et al, 2016; Jiam et al, 2017). Similar deficits have been observed in normally hearing listeners attending to CI-simulated speech (Luo et al, 2007; Chatterjee et al, 2015; Gilbers et al, 2015; Tinnemore et al, 2018)
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