Mandarin-Learning Preschoolers With Cochlear Implants Prioritize Prosody Over Semantics When Recognizing Emotion in...

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Auditory Neuroscience
• Speech and Language Pathology

Background:

• Accurate emotion identification in speech relies on integrating semantic and prosodic cues.
• Conflicting cues, common in irony or humor, pose challenges for emotion recognition.
• Typically hearing (TH) children, like adults, prioritize prosody when cues conflict.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate cue-weighting strategies in Mandarin-learning preschoolers with cochlear implants (CIs) when faced with conflicting semantic and prosodic emotional cues.
• To determine if children with CIs exhibit different cue-weighting strategies compared to their TH peers.
• To test the hypothesis that children with CIs might adopt a balanced or semantic-dominant strategy due to reduced access to prosody.

Main Methods:

• A 2-alternative forced-choice task was administered to 31 Mandarin-learning preschoolers with CIs and 31 age-matched TH controls.
• Stimuli included semantically incongruent sentences spoken with conflicting happy or sad prosody.
• The proportion of prosody-based responses was calculated and compared between the CI and TH groups.

Main Results:

• Both TH and CI groups significantly preferred prosody-based responses when cues conflicted, indicating a prosody-dominant strategy.
• No significant difference in the proportion of prosody-based responses was found between the CI and TH groups.
• These findings held true for the identification of basic emotions (happy vs. sad) in a closed-set task.

Conclusions:

• Mandarin-learning preschoolers with CIs who could utilize prosody demonstrated TH-like, prosody-dominant cue-weighting strategies.
• This suggests adaptive use of preserved prosodic information (e.g., duration, intensity) despite reduced spectrotemporal resolution from CIs.
• Rehabilitation should consider training non-pitch prosodic features to enhance emotion understanding and social communication in children with CIs.