Perception and Production of Emotional Prosody with Cochlear Implants

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Emotion communication is a fundamental part of spoken language. For patients with hearing loss who use cochlear implants (CIs), detecting emotions in speech presents a significant challenge. Deficits in vocal emotion perception observed in both children and adults with CIs have been linked with poor self-reported quality of life. For young children, learning to identify others’ emotions and express one’s own emotions is fundamental to social development. For adults, social communication is key to developing and maintaining social and professional networks and reducing the risk of social isolation. Yet, little is known about the mechanisms and factors that shape vocal emotion communication by children and adults with CIs. Primary cues to vocal emotions (voice characteristics such as pitch) are degraded in CI hearing, but secondary cues such as duration and intensity remain accessible to patients. Large, unexplained intersubject variability has been found in CI patients’ emotion identification and in emotions produced by children with CIs. Lack of knowledge about the sources of such variability presents a significant barrier to progress in CIs. The focus of this proposal is on the acoustic cues to emotion and how they are used by individual CI patients for the perception and production of emotional speech. In this application, we propose to test the novel mechanistic hypothesis that factors that may predict spoken emotion identification and production by CI patients – such as how long they have had their device (duration of device experience), their age at implantation and their access to residual acoustic hearing -- act by changing the relative use of primary/secondary acoustic cues (“cue- weighting”) by the individual patient. Over the last decade, we have conducted foundational research that provided valuable information about key predictors of vocal emotion perception and production by pediatric and adult CI recipients. The work proposed here will build on this body of work and extend it by using novel methodologies to measure CI users’ reliance on different acoustic cues to emotion (“cue-weighting”). In Aim 1, we will test the following hypotheses: [H1] that cue-weighting accounts significantly for inter-subject variations in vocal emotion identification by CI users; [H2] that optimization of cue-weighting patterns is the mechanism by which predictors such as the duration of device experience and age at implantation benefit vocal emotion identification, In Aim 2, we will test the hypothesis [H3] that in children with CIs, perceptual cue-weighting, together with early auditory experience (e.g., age at implantation and/or presence of usable hearing at birth) accounts significantly for inter-subject variation in emotional productions. The knowledge gained from these studies will provide the evidence-base to support the development of clinical protocols that support emotional communication by child and adult CI patients and will thus benefit quality of life for CI users across the life span.