Production of emotions by hearing-impaired and normal-hearing children

The present study examined the ability of hearing-impaired (HI) individuals compared with normal-hearing (NH) individuals to transmit non-verbal information on emotions and investigated the acoustical characteristics of their expressions of different emotions. Seven HI and five NH children produced one sentence in five different emotions: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral. The productions were judged by three naive listeners. The results indicated that the NH children's emotional expressions were perceived more accurately than those of the HI children. The accurately perceived productions underwent acoustical analysis. The results indicated significant differences in the fundamental frequency (Fo) range and in the intensity of the NH and HI children's productions. There were no significant intergroup differences in the productions' mean Fo or in the total duration. It was also shown that the five emotions examined differed significantly in all of the measured acoustical parameters among both NH and HI children.