Predictors of Emotional Prosody Identification by School-Age Children With Cochlear Implants and Their Peers With Normal Hearing.
Monita Chatterjee, Shivani Gajre, Aditya M Kulkarni and 2 others
PMID 37811966WHAT IT FOUND
School-age children with cochlear implants identified spoken emotions less accurately than normal-hearing peers.
Older age was linked to better scores in both groups. In children with implants, longer device use and higher problem-solving ability were linked to better scores.
Key findings
01Children with cochlear implants were worse at identifying emotions from unprocessed speech than normal-hearing children, and older children in both groups did better.
02For children with cochlear implants, longer device experience and higher nonverbal problem-solving ability were linked to better emotion identification, especially when exaggerated child-directed speech was used.
03Normal-hearing children performed much worse when speech was degraded to simulate cochlear implant processing, and their scores were not predicted by socioeconomic status, vocabulary, or nonverbal cognition.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study compared different children at the time of testing rather than following the same children over time, so it cannot show that age, device experience, or cognition caused better emotion recognition. Eight participants could not finish the full test procedure because of time constraints. The children with cochlear implants had lower vocabulary and nonverbal cognition scores than the normal-hearing group, so hearing status and these abilities differ together. Age at implantation and absence of usable residual hearing at birth were based on caregiver report. The study did not measure children's sensitivity to the acoustic cues involved in emotional prosody, such as pitch, duration, and intensity. The 8-channel noise-vocoded condition may have been more degraded than what children with cochlear implants actually hear. The simulation was tested in normal-hearing children without prior experience with degraded speech, so it cannot directly represent performance in children with cochlear implants.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The article is listed as receiving N.I.H. extramural research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that using child-directed speech or building problem-solving skills will improve emotion recognition in children with cochlear implants. This was an observational comparison of groups and listening conditions, not a treatment study.