Age-Related Changes in Voice Emotion Recognition by Postlingually Deafened Listeners With Cochlear Implants.
Shauntelle A Cannon, Monita Chatterjee
PMID 34406157WHAT IT FOUND
Older adults with cochlear implants and older normally hearing listeners were less accurate at recognizing spoken emotions.
Cochlear implant users also responded more slowly overall, and their response time did not lengthen with age as normally hearing listeners' did.
Key findings
01Older listeners made more emotion confusions than younger listeners, and age effects were significant in both the normally hearing and cochlear implant groups.
02Cochlear implant users showed more diffuse emotion confusions than normally hearing listeners.
03Normally hearing listeners became slower at responding with age, while cochlear implant users were slow at all ages and did not show that age-related slowing.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The cochlear implant group was small and older: only three participants were under 35 years, and the age difference between normally hearing and cochlear implant groups was significant (p = 0.018). Cognitive screening was not done, so age-related effects could have been influenced by cognition. Only one male and one female talker were used, so talker effects cannot be generalized to all male or female talkers. Psychoacoustic sensitivity to pitch or other emotion cues was not measured, so the mechanisms behind the declines are not known. Normally hearing listeners received only passive training, and more extensive training with vocoded speech might have changed the degraded-condition results. Cochlear implant simulations do not replicate auditory deprivation, damage, or electrical stimulation, so they are not a true representation of cochlear implant listening.
Declared interests
The supplied publication types indicate extramural National Institutes of Health research support. The text does not include an author conflict-of-interest declaration.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that cochlear implant use causes age-related emotion recognition decline. The study compared groups and did not control cognition, so age-related differences may reflect other factors. It also did not test implantation itself.