Vocal Emotion Communication With Cochlear Implants

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.

Conditions

• Cochlear Hearing Loss

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

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.

BEHAVIORAL

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.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Arizona State University

  collaborator OTHER

• House Institute Foundation

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• University of Nebraska

  collaborator OTHER

• National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)

  collaborator NIH

• Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR)

  collaborator NIH

• Father Flanagan's Boys' Home

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Monita Chatterjee, Ph.D. · Father Flanagan's Boys' Home

Study Design

Allocation

NA

Purpose

BASIC_SCIENCE

Masking

NONE

Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age

6 Years

Max Age

80 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2022-07-01

Primary Completion

2027-06-30

Completion

2027-06-30

Countries

• United States

Study Locations