Visual Gestures of the Head and Eyebrows Support Prosody Perception for Individuals with Cochlear Implants.

Everything was heard in a quiet room with no background noise. The authors say noise would likely make visual cues matter more, so this study probably understates their importance in real listening. One talker recorded every sentence, and one person's gesture habits may not stand for other talkers. The implant users taking part were doing well with their implants, and two others were dropped because their repetition showed no pitch variation at all. The authors expect weaker performers, or people implanted more recently, to lean on visual cues even more. The outcome was the pitch of a repeated sentence in a lab task, not communication in daily life. Conditions where the video and the audio came from different sentences never happen in real speech, so what those conditions show needs to be read with care. The control condition that lengthened a word was added after data collection had started and was run on only 12 of the 20 implant users and 15 of the 22 typical hearing participants. The groups were small, 20 and 22 people.

Funded by the US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (grant numbers F32DC021847, R01DC017114, R21DC021495). The authors declared no competing interests. No company that makes or sells cochlear implants funded, designed or wrote up the work.

Do not take this as evidence that watching a talker's face makes up for a poor implant fitting, or that visual cues can stand in for hearing the emphasis. In the implant group the gestures carried only 37% of the weight of a real pitch peak, everyone was tested in a quiet room with no background noise, and the measure was how participants pitched their own repeated sentence, not whether they understood it.