Voice Emotion Recognition by Children With Mild-to-Moderate Hearing Loss.
Shauntelle A Cannon, Monita Chatterjee
PMID 30074504WHAT IT FOUND
Children with mild-to-moderate hearing loss recognized emotions from recorded speech as accurately as normal-hearing children and took similar time.
They were still less accurate than adults, and vocabulary mattered for their performance.
Key findings
01With adult-directed speech, children with hearing loss and children with normal hearing had similar emotion-recognition accuracy and similar reaction times.
02In children with hearing loss, vocabulary was linked to emotion-recognition accuracy, while degree of hearing loss was not.
03Children with hearing loss showed a wider spread of poor scores with child-directed speech than normal-hearing children, even when group averages did not differ.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The hearing-loss group was smaller and had a narrower age range than the normal-hearing group. Some normal-hearing children were taken from an earlier study and did not have vocabulary or cognitive test results available. Only two talkers were used for each speech style, so talker effects and emotion patterns may not generalize. One child with hearing loss could not complete the child-directed condition. The study was observational and used recorded sentences, so it cannot show that hearing loss, age, or vocabulary caused the observed patterns. Hearing aid use during testing depended on each child's usual listening state, which may have varied across participants.
Declared interests
No author conflict-of-interest statement is included in the supplied text. The metadata lists NIH extramural research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that mild-to-moderate hearing loss cannot affect emotion recognition in daily life. The study tested recorded sentences from two talkers per condition, the hearing-loss group was small and age-restricted, and some children with hearing loss had much poorer scores than normal-hearing children on child-directed materials.