Hopyan-Misakyan Talar M, Gordon Karen A, Dennis Maureen, Papsin Blake C
Department of Psychology, Neurosciences and Mental Health Program, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada.
Child Neuropsychol. 2009 Mar;15(2):136-46. doi: 10.1080/09297040802403682.
Cochlear implant (CI) devices provide the opportunity for children who are deaf to perceive sound by electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve, with the goal of optimizing oral communication. One part of oral communication concerns meaning, while another part concerns emotion: affective speech prosody, in the auditory domain, and facial affect, in the visual domain. It is not known whether childhood CI users can identify emotion in speech and faces, so we investigated speech prosody and facial affect in children who had been deaf from infancy and experienced CI users.
Study participants were 18 CI users (ages 7-13 years) who received right unilateral CIs and 18 age- and gender-matched controls. Emotion recognition in speech prosody and faces was measured by the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy.
Compared to controls, children with right CIs could identify facial affect but not affective speech prosody. Age at test and time since CI activation were uncorrelated with overall outcome measures.
Children with right CIs recognize emotion in faces but have limited perception of affective speech prosody.
人工耳蜗（CI）设备为失聪儿童提供了通过电刺激听神经来感知声音的机会，目的是优化口语交流。口语交流的一部分涉及意义，而另一部分涉及情感：在听觉领域是情感语音韵律，在视觉领域是面部表情。尚不清楚儿童人工耳蜗使用者是否能够识别语音和面部中的情感，因此我们对自幼失聪且使用人工耳蜗的儿童的语音韵律和面部表情进行了研究。
研究参与者为18名接受右侧单侧人工耳蜗植入的人工耳蜗使用者（7至13岁）以及18名年龄和性别匹配的对照组。通过非语言准确性诊断分析来测量语音韵律和面部表情中的情感识别。
与对照组相比，接受右侧人工耳蜗植入的儿童能够识别面部表情，但不能识别情感语音韵律。测试时的年龄和人工耳蜗激活后的时间与总体结果指标无关。
接受右侧人工耳蜗植入的儿童能够识别面部表情中的情感，但对情感语音韵律的感知有限。
