Today, many children with cochlear implants (CIs) are implanted within the most adaptive period of development. Although the dominant cues to emotional prosody (voice pitch and its changes) are not well represented via CIs, some children with CIs show emotional prosody identification accuracy on par with typically hearing peers. However, many implanted children struggle to identify emotions in the same task. We hypothesize that the ability to utilize voice pitch contour and duration cues accounts partially for this large intersubject variability. Emotional productions by children with CIs also show unexplained variability. Our second hypothesis is that earlier age at implantation allows for emotional productions by children with CIs to be more strongly shaped by their perceptions. In support of our first hypothesis, preliminary results in 21 children with CIs show that utilization of voice pitch contour and duration cues obtained from a cue-weighting task for happy–sad emotion identification significantly predicts emotional prosody identification accuracy in a different task involving different talkers and five emotions (happy, sad, neutral, angry, scared). In support of our second hypothesis, correlations between identification accuracy in the five-emotion task and acoustic contrasts between happy and sad productions were stronger in earlier-implanted than in late-implanted children.
Chatterjee et al. (Wed,) studied this question.