Children's Recognition of Emotional Prosody in Spectrally Degraded Speech Is Predicted by Their Age and Cognitive Status.
Anna R Tinnemore, Danielle J Zion, Aditya M Kulkarni and 1 others
PMID 29337761WHAT IT FOUND
Increasing simulated cochlear implant speech channels from 8 to 16 did not show a stable benefit in normal-hearing children.
Age and nonverbal intelligence predicted emotion recognition more than vocabulary or parent-rated executive function.
Key findings
01In normal-hearing children listening to 8-channel and 16-channel simulated cochlear implant speech, age and nonverbal intelligence were significant predictors of voice emotion recognition, while receptive vocabulary and parent-rated executive function were not.
02The effect of spectral resolution was not stable: condition was not significant when age was analyzed continuously, but was significant when age was grouped.
03Children's performance across full-spectrum, 16-channel and 8-channel conditions was significantly correlated with age, and full-spectrum performance was near ceiling.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study tested normal-hearing children listening to simulated cochlear implant speech, not children with cochlear implants, so it cannot directly show how implant users perform. Noiseband-vocoded speech is an approximation of electrical stimulation and cannot reproduce implant experience or age at implantation. The authors explicitly caution against drawing direct inferences about children with cochlear implants from these data. Two children were excluded because full-spectrum performance was 2.5 and 4.0 standard deviations below the mean, and six children were missing one or more cognitive measures because of time constraints. Full-spectrum performance was near ceiling, which limits interpretation of age effects in that condition. The analyzed sample included 28 children, with 12 younger children, so the grouped age findings may be unstable. The effect of increasing channels from 8 to 16 changed depending on whether age was analyzed continuously or grouped.
Declared interests
The supplied text lists the paper as supported by N.I.H. extramural research. It does not include an author conflict-of-interest declaration.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as proof that children with cochlear implants will improve when spectral resolution increases from 8 to 16 channels. The children had normal hearing and listened to noiseband-vocoded simulations, and the benefit was not consistent across analyses.