Cue-weighting for emotion perception by pediatric/young adult and postlingually deaf adult cochlear implantees, and typically hearing counterparts

Cochlear implant (CI) patients generally exhibit poorer emotional prosody identification than their typically hearing (TH) counterparts. Utilization of prosodic cues by CI listeners may depend on their auditory experience. Here, we assessed reliance on voice pitch (F0) contour, duration, and intensity cues in a happy/sad emotion identification task using stimuli with the cues manipulated orthogonally. Results showed that TH adults relied strongly on F0 contour and duration cues in the task. TH children exhibited developmental effects, relying less on F0 and duration cues than TH adults. Prelingually deaf, young cochlear implant (YCI) users and postlingually deaf adults with cochlear implants relied less on F0 cues than their TH counterparts. For YCI, early implantation was associated with slightly better utilization of F0 cues, and device experience was a strong predictor of F0 and duration cue utilization. These results underscore the importance of early implantation but also demonstrate experience-driven malleability of cue-utilization for emotional prosody identification, suggesting that rehabilitation targeting prosodic cues is likely to benefit pediatric CI recipients. In YCI, the weighting of both F0 contour and duration cues predicted their accuracy in an emotional prosody identification task using naturally recorded materials and thus may be relevant to their everyday emotion communication.