Perception and production of vocal emotions by listeners with normal hearing and with cochlear implants

Abstract

Informative cues for vocal emotions in speech include voice characteristics, speaking rate and intensity. For listeners with cochlear implants, voice characteristics such as pitch and vocal tract length are weakly represented in the electric signal; intensity cues are weakly to moderately preserved, and speaking rate is well represented. Our studies indicate that school-age children (6–18 years of age) with cochlear implants have significant deficits in their recognition of vocal emotions relative to normally hearing peers, similar to post-lingually deaf adults with cochlear implants. However, in contrast to the post-lingually deaf adults, children with cochlear implants showed large deficits in their productions of vocal emotions (happy/sad contrasts), measured in 1) acoustic analyses of the produced speech and 2) normally hearing listeners’ perceptions of the produced emotions. In contrast to emotions, the words and sentences produced by the children with cochlear implants were highly intelligible. Post-lingually deaf adults with cochlear implants, however, showed excellent performance in the voice emotion production task. These results suggest that the perception of vocal emotions by listeners with cochlear implants may be limited primarily by device limitations, while emotion productions in speech are shaped more strongly by early auditory experience.