title: Voice emotion recognition by cochlear-implanted children and their normally-hearing peers.
abstract: Despite their remarkable success in bringing spoken language to hearing impaired listeners, the signal transmitted through cochlear implants (CIs) remains impoverished in spectro-temporal fine structure. As a consequence, pitch-dominant information such as voice emotion, is diminished. For young children, the ability to correctly identify the mood/intent of the speaker (which may not always be visible in their facial expression) is an important aspect of social and linguistic development. Previous work in the field has shown that children with cochlear implants (cCI) have significant deficits in voice emotion recognition relative to their normally hearing peers (cNH). Here, we report on voice emotion recognition by a cohort of 36 school-aged cCI. Additionally, we provide for the first time, a comparison of their performance to that of cNH and NH adults (aNH) listening to CI simulations of the same stimuli. We also provide comparisons to the performance of adult listeners with CIs (aCI), most of whom learned language primarily through normal acoustic hearing. Results indicate that, despite strong variability, on average, cCI perform similarly to their adult counterparts; that both groups' mean performance is similar to aNHs' performance with 8-channel noise-vocoded speech; that cNH achieve excellent scores in voice emotion recognition with full-spectrum speech, but on average, show significantly poorer scores than aNH with 8-channel noise-vocoded speech. A strong developmental effect was observed in the cNH with noise-vocoded speech in this task. These results point to the considerable benefit obtained by cochlear-implanted children from their devices, but also underscore the need for further research and development in this important and neglected area. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled <Lasker Award>.
authors.affiliation: Auditory Prostheses & Perception Lab., Boys Town National Research Hospital, 555 N 30th St, Omaha, NE 68131, USA. Electronic address: monita.chatterjee@boystown.org.
authors.forename: Monita
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Chatterjee
authors.affiliation: Department of Hearing & Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, 0100 LeFrak Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
authors.forename: Danielle J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Zion
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, 818 Ross Research Building, 720 Rutland Avenue, Baltimore, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Mickael L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Deroche
authors.affiliation: Auditory Prostheses & Perception Lab., Boys Town National Research Hospital, 555 N 30th St, Omaha, NE 68131, USA.
authors.forename: Brooke A
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Burianek
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, 818 Ross Research Building, 720 Rutland Avenue, Baltimore, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Charles J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Limb
authors.affiliation: Auditory Prostheses & Perception Lab., Boys Town National Research Hospital, 555 N 30th St, Omaha, NE 68131, USA; Department of Hearing & Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, 0100 LeFrak Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
authors.forename: Alison P
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Goren
authors.affiliation: Auditory Prostheses & Perception Lab., Boys Town National Research Hospital, 555 N 30th St, Omaha, NE 68131, USA.
authors.forename: Aditya M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Kulkarni
authors.affiliation: Auditory Prostheses & Perception Lab., Boys Town National Research Hospital, 555 N 30th St, Omaha, NE 68131, USA.
authors.forename: Julie A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Christensen
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000162:Acoustics; D000293:Adolescent; D000294:Adolescent Behavior; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D002652:Child Behavior; D002663:Child Language; D019929:Cochlear Implantation / Q000295:instrumentation*; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D003463:Cues; D004558:Electric Stimulation; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010379:Peer Group; D019986:Persons with Hearing Disabilities / Q000523:psychology / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D010898:Pitch Perception; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors; D014833:Voice Quality