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Updated: Aug 15, 2025

Systematic Hearing Performance Evaluation Process for Adolescents with Cochlear Implantation at Early Ages
Published on: March 24, 2023
Crossmodal benefits to vocal emotion perception in cochlear implant users
Celina Isabelle von Eiff1,2,3, Sascha Frühholz4,5, Daniela Korth6
1Department for General Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Institute of Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, 07743 Jena, Germany.
Abstract:
Speech comprehension counts as a benchmark outcome of cochlear implants (CIs)-disregarding the communicative importance of efficient integration of audiovisual (AV) socio-emotional information. We investigated effects of time-synchronized facial information on vocal emotion recognition (VER). In Experiment 1, 26 CI users and normal-hearing (NH) individuals classified emotions for auditory-only, AV congruent, or AV incongruent utterances. In Experiment 2, we compared crossmodal effects between groups with adaptive testing, calibrating auditory difficulty via voice morphs from emotional caricatures to anti-caricatures. CI users performed lower than NH individuals, and VER was correlated with life quality. Importantly, they showed larger benefits to VER with congruent facial emotional information even at equal auditory-only performance levels, suggesting that their larger crossmodal benefits result from deafness-related compensation rather than degraded acoustic representations. Crucially, vocal caricatures enhanced CI users' VER. Findings advocate AV stimuli during CI rehabilitation and suggest perspectives of caricaturing for both perceptual trainings and sound processor technology.
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