Prosody perception and production by children with cochlear implants.

Daan J Van De Velde,Johan H M Frijns,Claartje C Levelt,Niels O Schiller,Mieke Beers,Vincent J Van Heuven,Jeroen J Briaire

doi:10.1017/s0305000918000387

Daan J Van De Velde, Johan H M Frijns + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000918000387

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Abstract

The perception and production of emotional and linguistic (focus) prosody were compared in children with cochlear implants (CI) and normally hearing (NH) peers. Thirteen CI and thirteen hearing-age-matched school-aged NH children were tested, as baseline, on non-verbal emotion understanding, non-word repetition, and stimulus identification and naming. Main tests were verbal emotion discrimination, verbal focus position discrimination, acted emotion production, and focus production. Productions were evaluated by NH adult Dutch listeners. All scores between groups were comparable, except a lower score for the CI group for non-word repetition. Emotional prosody perception and production scores correlated weakly for CI children but were uncorrelated for NH children. In general, hearing age weakly predicted emotion production but not perception. Non-verbal emotional (but not linguistic) understanding predicted CI children's (but not controls') emotion perception and production. In conclusion, increasing time in sound might facilitate vocal emotional expression, possibly requiring independently maturing emotion perception skills.

Highlights

IntroductionProsody is defined as the speech information which cannot be reduced to the individual segments (consonants and vowels) or their juxtaposition (Rietveld & Van Heuven, 2016)
Prosody is defined as the speech information which cannot be reduced to the individual segments or their juxtaposition (Rietveld & Van Heuven, 2016)
These results suggest that, to the degree tested, the two groups have largely comparable levels of non-verbal emotion understanding, entailing for the hypotheses that group differences on main tests would not generally be due to differences in non-verbal emotion understanding

Summary

Introduction

Prosody is defined as the speech information which cannot be reduced to the individual segments (consonants and vowels) or their juxtaposition (Rietveld & Van Heuven, 2016). In a series of studies testing 181 implanted children, speech perception and production performance explained 42% of overall total language scores and as much as 63% when split for overall spoken language scores (Geers, Nicholas, & Sedey, 2003) Problems in those areas have been associated with delays in socioemotional development. Performance on all tests was poorer than for the control group and showed positive correlations between language and emotion tests that require verbal processing These results showed that CI children experience delays in verbal as well as non-verbal emotion understanding and that some aspects of linguistic development can predict aspects of emotional development. Prosody perception in CI users For pediatric as well as adult CI users, several aspects of the perception and production of emotional and linguistic prosody have proven relatively problematic compared to comprehension of sentences (e.g., Helms et al, 1997)

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