Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA.
Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.
Ear Hear. 2018 Sep/Oct;39(5):874-880. doi: 10.1097/AUD.0000000000000546.
It is known that school-aged children with cochlear implants show deficits in voice emotion recognition relative to normal-hearing peers. Little, however, is known about normal-hearing children's processing of emotional cues in cochlear implant-simulated, spectrally degraded speech. The objective of this study was to investigate school-aged, normal-hearing children's recognition of voice emotion, and the degree to which their performance could be predicted by their age, vocabulary, and cognitive factors such as nonverbal intelligence and executive function.
Normal-hearing children (6-19 years old) and young adults were tested on a voice emotion recognition task under three different conditions of spectral degradation using cochlear implant simulations (full-spectrum, 16-channel, and 8-channel noise-vocoded speech). Measures of vocabulary, nonverbal intelligence, and executive function were obtained as well.
Adults outperformed children on all tasks, and a strong developmental effect was observed. The children's age, the degree of spectral resolution, and nonverbal intelligence were predictors of performance, but vocabulary and executive functions were not, and no interactions were observed between age and spectral resolution.
These results indicate that cognitive function and age play important roles in children's ability to process emotional prosody in spectrally degraded speech. The lack of an interaction between the degree of spectral resolution and children's age further suggests that younger and older children may benefit similarly from improvements in spectral resolution. The findings imply that younger and older children with cochlear implants may benefit similarly from technical advances that improve spectral resolution.
已知植入人工耳蜗的学龄儿童在识别语音情感方面存在缺陷，相对于听力正常的同龄人。然而，对于听力正常的儿童在人工耳蜗模拟的频谱失真语音中处理情感线索的情况知之甚少。本研究的目的是调查学龄期正常听力儿童对语音情感的识别能力，以及他们的表现程度可以通过他们的年龄、词汇量以及认知因素（如非言语智力和执行功能）来预测。
正常听力儿童（6-19 岁）和年轻成年人在三种不同的频谱退化条件下使用人工耳蜗模拟进行语音情感识别任务（全频谱、16 通道和 8 通道噪声编码语音）。还获得了词汇量、非言语智力和执行功能的测量值。
成年人在所有任务上的表现均优于儿童，并且观察到强烈的发展效应。儿童的年龄、频谱分辨率程度和非言语智力是表现的预测因素，但词汇量和执行功能不是，并且年龄和频谱分辨率之间没有观察到相互作用。
这些结果表明，认知功能和年龄在儿童处理频谱失真语音中情感韵律的能力中起着重要作用。频谱分辨率程度和儿童年龄之间缺乏相互作用进一步表明，年幼和年长的儿童可能从频谱分辨率的提高中受益相似。这些发现表明，植入人工耳蜗的年幼和年长儿童可能从提高频谱分辨率的技术进步中受益相似。
