A comparison of perception and everyday evaluation of emotional prosody at the beginning of cochlear implant treatment and after completion of follow-up therapy

Prosody is the vocal and speech-related expression contained in the speech signal that, in addition to the semantic meaning conveyed by word choice, conveys, for example, the emotional content of the speaker’s voice. However, cochlear implant (CI) users have only limited access to speech sound characteristics for auditory comprehension. This makes it difficult to attribute meaning to prosodic patterns. This can lead to misinterpretations, a reduced intelligibility, and misunderstandings in communication and social interactions. As a result, it is to be expected that people with severe hearing impairments will feel excluded in social situations. Both aspects – the reduced ability to recognize emotions and the psychosocial consequences – are the subject of this article. The aim of this study was to undertake a retrospective comparison of two methods for measuring emotional prosody perception: firstly, the “Test of Emotional Prosody Perception” (TEPP-CI); and secondly, the “Questionnaire on emotional communication in hearing situations” (EMO-CHeQ). The EMO-CHeQ has already demonstrated its efficacy in cross-sectional studies involving users of hearing aids, CI as well as and normal-hearing (NH) listeners. The present study focuses on longitudinal measurements in CI care, specifically at the beginning of CI care and after the end of follow-up therapy. The stimuli used in the TEPP-CI were drawn from an evaluated prosodic speech corpus. These consist of 2-syllable nonsense pseudowords. These were spoken by two actors (one female, one male using the prosodic expressions of joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, as well as in a neutral tone. The stimuli were presented to postlingually deafened CI users directly through the speech processor at a comfortable level. The EMO-CHeQ measures subjective emotional prosody recognition in everyday life using four subscales and an overall scale. In the TEPP-CI, correct classifications exceeded the chance level. The CI users improved in emotional prosody perception, though not to the same extent as in the speech tests. The EMO-CHeQ showed an improvement in subjective emotional prosody recognition. The results of the follow-up assessments will be used in the future to improve the perception of sound qualities in CI users through targeted auditory training.