Prosody perception and production by children with cochlear implants

Area of Science:

• Audiology
• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Cochlear implants (CI) offer auditory input to deaf children, but their impact on prosody development is not fully understood.
• Prosody, encompassing emotional and linguistic aspects, is crucial for effective communication.
• Understanding prosody in CI users is vital for their social and linguistic integration.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the perception and production of emotional and linguistic prosody in children with cochlear implants (CI) and normally hearing (NH) children.
• To investigate the relationship between prosody skills and other cognitive-linguistic abilities in both groups.
• To explore the influence of hearing age and non-verbal understanding on prosody development in CI users.

Main Methods:

• A cohort of 13 CI users and 13 age-matched NH children participated.
• Baseline assessments included non-verbal emotion understanding, non-word repetition, and stimulus identification/naming.
• Primary tests involved verbal emotion and focus discrimination, and acted emotion and focus production, evaluated by NH adult listeners.

Main Results:

• Overall prosody perception and production scores were comparable between CI and NH groups, with a notable exception of lower non-word repetition in the CI group.
• Emotional prosody perception and production correlated weakly in CI children, but not in NH children.
• Non-verbal emotional understanding significantly predicted prosody perception and production in CI children, but not in controls.

Conclusions:

• Increasing duration of cochlear implant use may enhance vocal emotional expression.
• Developing independent emotion perception skills appears crucial for facilitating emotional prosody production in CI users.
• While CI users demonstrate comparable prosody skills, subtle differences in the integration of perception and production suggest distinct developmental pathways.