ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2024
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2024

Production and perception of emotional intonation among preschool children with cochlear implants

Fang Zhang, Hongtao Li, Ao Chen

Children with cochlear implants (CI) often have difficulties processing low frequency due to insufficient resolution of frequency filters of the CI, leading to inaccurate pitch perception. The current study investigated intonation perception and production of Chinese preschool children (3-5-year-olds) with CI. In Experiment 1, 55 children with CI and 44 children with normal hearing (NH) were auditorily presented with six pairs of semantically neutral sentences, with each pair including a happy and a sad intonation. The children were asked to identify the emotion of each sentence by selecting cards with corresponding facial expressions. Neither the NH children nor the children with CI were able to identify the emotions accurately. In Experiment 2, using a sentence repetition paradigm, another 51 children with CI and 32 NH children produced the six pairs of sentences used Experiment 1. Compared to the happy sentences, both groups showed a lower mean f0 for the sad sentences. Nevertheless, only the NH children made use of f0 range and intensity cues when differentiating the two emotions. These results indicate late development of perceptual emotional intonation representation, and the CI children made use of less cues compared to NH children when marking sentential emotion.