Center of Excellence (C-PEC), All India Institute of Speech and Hearing, Mysuru, India.
Department of Audiology, All India Institute of Speech and Hearing, Mysuru, India.
J Int Adv Otol. 2024 Sep 26;20(5):383-389. doi: 10.5152/iao.2024.241480.
The significance of emotional prosody in social communication is well-established, yet research on emotion perception among cochlear implant (CI) users is less extensive. This study aims to explore vocal emotion perception in children using CI and bimodal hearing devices and compare them with their normal hearing (NH) peers. The study involved children aged 4-10 years with unilateral CI and contralateral hearing aid (HA), matched with NH peers by gender and listening age. Children were selected using snowball sampling for the CI group and purposive sampling for the NH group. Vocal emotion perception was assessed for semantically neutral sentences in "happy," "sad," and "angry" emotions using a 3 alternate forced choice test. The NH group demonstrated significantly superior emotion perception (P=.002) compared to the CI group. Both groups accurately identified the "happy" emotion. However, the NH group had higher scores for the "angry" emotion compared to the "sad" emotion, while the CI group showed better scores for "sad" than "angry" emotion. Bimodal hearing devices improved recognition of "sad"and "angry" emotions, with a decrease in confusion percentages. The unbiased hit (Hu) value provided more substantial insight than the hit score. Bimodal hearing devices enhance the perception of "sad" and "angry" vocal emotions compared to using a CI alone, likely due to the HA providing the temporal fine structure cues, thereby better representing fundamental frequency variations. Children with unilateral CI benefit significantly in the perception of emotions by using a HA in the contralateral ear, aiding in better socio-emotional development.
情感韵律在社交交流中的重要性已得到充分证实，但针对人工耳蜗（CI）使用者的情绪感知研究则相对较少。本研究旨在探索使用 CI 和双模式听力设备的儿童的声音情绪感知，并将其与正常听力（NH）同龄人进行比较。研究对象为年龄在 4-10 岁、单侧使用 CI 和对侧助听器（HA）的儿童，按照性别和听力年龄与 NH 同龄人相匹配。使用雪球抽样法选择 CI 组的儿童，使用目的抽样法选择 NH 组的儿童。使用 3 种交替强制选择测试法，对语义中性的句子进行“快乐”、“悲伤”和“愤怒”三种情绪的声音情绪感知评估。NH 组的情绪感知明显优于 CI 组（P=.002）。两组儿童都能准确识别“快乐”情绪。然而，与“悲伤”情绪相比，NH 组对“愤怒”情绪的得分更高，而 CI 组对“悲伤”情绪的得分则高于“愤怒”情绪。双模式听力设备提高了对“悲伤”和“愤怒”情绪的识别能力，降低了混淆百分比。无偏击中值（Hu）值比击中得分提供了更有意义的见解。与单独使用 CI 相比，双模式听力设备增强了对“悲伤”和“愤怒”声音情绪的感知，这可能是因为 HA 提供了时间精细结构线索，从而更好地代表了基频变化。单侧 CI 儿童在对侧耳朵使用 HA 后，在情绪感知方面受益显著，有助于更好的社会情感发展。
