Perception and Production of Emotional Prosody with Cochlear Implants

项目摘要/摘要 情感交流是口语的基本组成部分。对于听力损失的患者使用 人工耳蜗植入(CI)，检测语音中的情感是一个巨大的挑战。发声缺陷 在儿童和成人中观察到的情绪知觉与不良的自我报告有关。 生活质量。对于年幼的孩子来说，学会识别他人的情绪并表达自己的情绪是 对社会发展至关重要。对于成年人来说，社交是发展和保持的关键 建立社会和职业关系网，减少社会孤立的风险。然而，人们对这一现象知之甚少 影响儿童和成人顺式发声情感交流的机制和因素。主要 声音情绪的提示(声音特征，如音调)在CI听力中退化，但次要提示 例如持续时间和强度，患者仍然可以使用。巨大的、无法解释的学科间变异性 在CI患者的情绪识别和CI儿童产生的情绪中被发现。缺乏 对这种可变性来源的了解是独联体取得进展的一个重大障碍。的关注点 这项建议是关于情绪的声学线索，以及个体CI患者如何使用它们来 情绪言语的感知和产生。在这个应用中，我们建议测试新的机械 假设可能预测CI患者口语情绪识别和产生的因素--例如 他们拥有设备的时间(设备体验的持续时间)、植入时的年龄和访问权限 对于残留的声学听力--通过改变主要/次要声学提示的相对使用(“提示-- 加权“)由个别患者提供。 在过去的十年里，我们进行了基础性研究，提供了关于 儿童和成人CI接受者的声音情绪知觉和产生的关键预测因素。这项工作 这里提出的建议将建立在这项工作的基础上，并通过使用新的方法来衡量CI用户的 依赖于情绪的不同声音提示(“线索加权”)。在目标1中，我们将检验以下假设： [H1]线索加权显著解释了CI语音情绪识别中被试之间的差异 用户；[H2]提示权重模式的优化是一种机制，通过这种机制， 在目标2中，设备经验的持续时间和植入时的年龄有助于声音情感识别，我们将测试 假设[H3]，在患有顺式思维的儿童中，知觉线索加权与早期听觉经验一起 (例如，植入时的年龄和/或出生时存在可用听力)对受试者间的影响很大 情绪产生的变化。 从这些研究中获得的知识将为支持 支持儿童和成人CI患者情感交流的临床方案，从而将受益 CI用户在整个生命周期内的生活质量。

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.