Communicating Emotion: Vocal Expression of Linguistic and Emotional Prosody in Children With Mild to Profound Hearing Loss Compared With That of Normal Hearing Peers.

Children acted emotions rather than speaking spontaneously, so results may not match everyday communication. Only mean pitch, pitch variation and loudness were analysed; rhythm, pace and other prosodic features were not measured. The hearing-aid group included a wide range of hearing losses, so the study could not compare outcomes by degree of loss. Normal-hearing children were not audiometrically tested, so slight hearing losses could not be ruled out. Participants had to read at a third-grade level, which may have excluded children with lower reading ability. The study did not ask listeners to judge emotion, so it is unknown whether acoustic differences affect social communication.

The paper reports that one author, T.J.d.J., was funded by the Cochlear Fund.

Do not conclude that hearing aids or cochlear implants make emotional speech normal. The study found similar average acoustic measures, but also found poorer happy-sad pitch contrasts, and it did not test whether listeners perceive emotion in spontaneous speech.