Weighting of Prosodic and Lexical-Semantic Cues for Emotion Identification in Spectrally Degraded Speech and With Cochlear Implants.
Margaret E Richter, Monita Chatterjee
PMID 34294630WHAT IT FOUND
Normal-hearing listeners rely on tone of voice, but cochlear implant users and those hearing simulated implant speech rely more on the words themselves.
When tone and words conflict, implant users are better at catching the literal meaning but miss the sarcasm or true emotion conveyed by the voice.
Key findings
01Cochlear implant users rely less on prosodic cues and more on lexical-semantic cues than normal-hearing listeners when identifying emotion.
02Normal-hearing listeners shift toward relying on words rather than tone when speech is spectrally degraded, mimicking the pattern seen in cochlear implant users.
03Cochlear implant users had significantly longer reaction times than normal-hearing listeners, though this may be partly due to age differences between the groups.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The two groups were not age-matched; the cochlear implant users were significantly older than the normal-hearing listeners, which may have influenced reaction times. The study used only two female talkers, limiting the generalizability of findings regarding talker variability. The sample size was small (8 cochlear implant users), and the study design did not allow for complex statistical models to fully account for all variables. The study used noise-vocoded speech to simulate cochlear implant hearing for normal-hearing listeners, which is an approximation of the actual percept.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest, financial or otherwise.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume cochlear implant users are 'better' at understanding emotion because they were more accurate in the conflict condition. They were only more accurate at identifying the literal meaning of the words. They likely missed the speaker's true emotional intent, which was conveyed by the conflicting tone, a key failure in understanding sarcasm or concealed feelings.