Recognition of Affective Speech Prosody and Facial Affect in Deaf Children with Unilateral Right Cochlear Implants

Cochlear implant (CI) devices provide the opportunity for children who are deaf to perceive sound by electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve, with the goal of optimizing oral communication. One part of oral communication concerns meaning, while another part concerns emotion: affective speech prosody, in the auditory domain, and facial affect, in the visual domain. It is not known whether childhood CI users can identify emotion in speech and faces, so we investigated speech prosody and facial affect in children who had been deaf from infancy and experienced CI users. METHOD: Study participants were 18 CI users (ages 7-13 years) who received right unilateral CIs and 18 age- and gender-matched controls. Emotion recognition in speech prosody and faces was measured by the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy. RESULTS: Compared to controls, children with right CIs could identify facial affect but not affective speech prosody. Age at test and time since CI activation were uncorrelated with overall outcome measures. CONCLUSION: Children with right CIs recognize emotion in faces but have limited perception of affective speech prosody.