Speaker
Description
Hearing and identifying emotional prosody (the tone and manner of speaking that conveys emotions) is a key element of spoken communication. Voice pitch inflections are a dominant cue for emotional prosody, but sensitivity to voice pitch is reduced in cochlear implant patients relative to normally hearing peers, likely accounting for their impaired performance in emotion identification. In this presentation, I will review the literature on emotional prosody identification by adults and children with cochlear implants, and then focus on our recent findings on how cochlear implant users with different auditory experiences utilize voice pitch contours, duration cues, and intensity cues for emotion perception. I will also describe our findings on the extent to which their use of these cues accounts for individual variability in their identification of emotions in speech.Key findings I will discuss are summarized as follows: 1) the utilization of both voice pitch contour cues and duration cues accounts for emotional prosody perception by CI users; 2) prelingually deaf, young CI users and postlingually deaf, middle-aged and older CI users show some differences in cue-utilization; 3) in young prelingually deaf CI users, duration of device experience is positively associated with voice pitch contour cue utilization, while earlier age of implantation plays a small but significant role. Finally, I will discuss implications of these findings for CI users’ daily social exchanges.