Auditory Prostheses and Perception Laboratory, Center for Hearing Research, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, NE.
Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Barkley Memorial Center.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2019 Oct 25;62(10):3728-3740. doi: 10.1044/2019_JSLHR-S-18-0497. Epub 2019 Oct 7.
Purpose Cochlear implants (CIs) transmit a degraded version of the acoustic input to the listener. This impacts the perception of harmonic pitch, resulting in deficits in the perception of voice features critical to speech prosody. Such deficits may relate to changes in how children with CIs (CCIs) learn to produce vocal emotions. The purpose of this study was to investigate happy and sad emotional speech productions by school-age CCIs, compared to productions by children with normal hearing (NH), postlingually deaf adults with CIs, and adults with NH. Method All individuals recorded the same emotion-neutral sentences in a happy manner and a sad manner. These recordings were then used as stimuli in an emotion recognition task performed by child and adult listeners with NH. Their performance was taken as a measure of how well the 4 groups of talkers communicated the 2 emotions. Results Results showed high variability in the identifiability of emotions produced by CCIs, relative to other groups. Some CCIs produced highly identifiable emotions, while others showed deficits. The postlingually deaf adults with CIs produced highly identifiable emotions and relatively small intersubject variability. Age at implantation was found to be a significant predictor of performance by CCIs. In addition, the NH listeners' age predicted how well they could identify the emotions produced by CCIs. Thus, older NH child listeners were better able to identify the CCIs' intended emotions than younger NH child listeners. In contrast to the deficits in their emotion productions, CCIs produced highly intelligible words in the sentences carrying the emotions. Conclusions These results confirm previous findings showing deficits in CCIs' productions of prosodic cues and indicate that early auditory experience plays an important role in vocal emotion productions by individuals with CIs.
目的
人工耳蜗（CI）将声音输入的退化版本传输给听众。这会影响到听众对谐波音高的感知，从而导致对言语韵律至关重要的语音特征感知缺陷。这些缺陷可能与 CI 儿童（CCI）学习产生嗓音情绪的方式的变化有关。本研究的目的是调查学龄期 CCI 与正常听力（NH）儿童、后天失聪的 CI 成人和 NH 成人在产生快乐和悲伤情绪的言语方面的差异。
方法
所有参与者都以快乐和悲伤的方式录制相同的情绪中性句子。然后，这些录音将被用作 NH 儿童和成人进行情绪识别任务的刺激。他们的表现被用作衡量 4 组说话者传达 2 种情绪的能力的指标。
结果
结果表明，与其他组相比，CCI 产生的情绪可识别性存在高度差异。一些 CCI 产生了高度可识别的情绪，而其他 CCI 则表现出缺陷。后天失聪的 CI 成人产生了高度可识别的情绪和相对较小的个体间变异性。植入年龄被发现是 CCI 表现的一个重要预测因素。此外，NH 听众的年龄预测了他们识别 CCI 产生的情绪的能力。因此，年龄较大的 NH 儿童听众比年龄较小的 NH 儿童听众更能识别 CCI 的意图情绪。与他们在情绪产生方面的缺陷形成对比的是，CCI 在承载情绪的句子中产生了高度可理解的单词。
结论
这些结果证实了先前关于 CCI 在韵律线索产生方面存在缺陷的发现，并表明早期听觉体验在 CI 个体的嗓音情绪产生中起着重要作用。
