Speaker
Description
Emotional prosody plays an role in social communication, yet little is known about how children with hearing loss express emotions through speech. This research combines findings from three studies investigating emotional prosodic expression in children with cochlear implants, children with hearing aids, and children with normal hearing.Across the studies, speech recordings of Dutch-speaking children aged 7–18 years were collected during tasks in which they produced emotional utterances expressing happiness, sadness, and anger. Emotional expression was examined using three approaches: perceptual evaluation by normal-hearing listeners, acoustic analysis of prosodic features, and machine-learning–based speech emotion recognition (SER).Perceptual evaluations showed that both children and adult listeners were generally able to recognize emotions expressed by children with hearing loss nearly as accurately as those expressed by children with normal hearing. However, happiness was identified less accurately in children with cochlear implants and was more often confused with sadness in both cochlear implant and hearing aid users. Acoustic analyses demonstrated that the prosodic patterns of children with hearing loss were comparable to those of normal-hearing peers, although some reduced contrasts between emotions were observed. The machine-learning–based SER system classified emotional speech produced by children with normal hearing more accurately than that of children with hearing loss, particularly for happiness.Together, these findings suggest that children with hearing loss retain the ability to express emotions vocally, with only subtle differences compared to their normal-hearing peers. These results highlight the resilience of children with hearing loss in developing emotional communication skills, while also pointing to areas that may benefit from research and targeted support.