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Vocal Emotion Communication With Cochlear Implants
Sponsor: Father Flanagan's Boys' Home
Summary
Patients with hearing loss who use cochlear implants (CIs) show significant deficits and strong unexplained intersubject variability in their perception and production of spoken emotions in speech. This project will investigate the hypothesis that "cue-weighting", or how patients utilize the different acoustic cues to emotion, accounts for significant variance in emotional communication with CIs. The results will focus on children with CIs, but parallel measures in postlingually deaf adults with CIs will be made, ensuring that results of these studies benefit social communication by CI patients across the lifespan by informing the development of technological innovations and improved clinical protocols.
Official title: Perception and Production of Emotional Prosody With Cochlear Implants
Key Details
Gender
All
Age Range
6 Years - 80 Years
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Enrollment
255
Start Date
2022-07-01
Completion Date
2027-06-30
Last Updated
2025-09-19
Healthy Volunteers
Yes
Conditions
Interventions
Perception of acoustic cues to emotion
Using novel methodologies and stimuli comprising both controlled laboratory recordings and materials culled from databases of ecologically valid speech emotions (e.g., from publicly available podcasts), the team aims to collect perceptual data to build a statistical model to test the hypothesis that experience-based changes in emotion identification by pediatric and adult CI recipients is mediated by improvements in cue-optimization.
Production of acoustic cues to emotion
The team will acoustically analyze vocal emotion productions by participants, quantify acoustic features of spoken emotions, and obtain behavioral measures of how well normally hearing listeners can identify those emotions.
Locations (4)
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona, United States
House Institute Foundation
Los Angeles, California, United States
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois, United States
Boys Town National Research Hospital
Omaha, Nebraska, United States