Recognition of Voice Emotion in School Aged Children with Cochlear Implants

Objectives:The cochlear implant (CI) is a device providing congenitally deafened children with access to speech perception. Children with Cls may have good speech perception skills and language development, but still experience difficulties in the perception of prosody based on pitch information. The purpose of this study is to examine the difference between children with Cls and children with normal hearing (NH) in their voice emotion recognition abilities. Methods:The participants were 10 children with Cls and 10 children with NH. Children with Cls all attended regular elementary schools, achieved a typical developmental level on a formal language test, and demonstrated good speech perception abilities (95% in an open set word test).The accuracy of emotion recognition was evaluated by listening to a total of 24 sentences with four different emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, and anger). Results:There were statistically significant differences between groups and also among emotions. Overall, children with Cls showed lower performance than children with NH in recognition of voice emotion (16.1 vs. 23.7). Children with Cls more accurately identified happiness than they did fear (5.1 vs. 2.5). Half of their total identification errors were between fear and sadness (47.36%). Conclusion: The results indicate that children with Cls have difficulties in voice emotion recognition, even if they have no difficulties in speech perception or language development. In error analysis, difficulties in identifying between fear and sadness could be explained by confusion in same valence-arousal space. It is possible that prosodic elements of voice emotions were not sufficiently conveyed through the cochlear implant system. Such results highlight the need for a rehabilitation program addressing these features.