OBJECTIVES: The processing of emotional speech requires the perception and integration of semantics, prosody, and facial cues. While hearing aids (HAs) and cochlear implants (CIs) provide significant auditory enhancements, they are limited in conveying emotional prosody, potentially affecting users' ability to recognize emotions through both auditory and visual modalities....
✦ The floor
Discussion
Signed responses from readers of the wire.
Clinicians fitting hearing aids or cochlear implants to Mandarin-speaking patients should be aware that emotional speech understanding involves a complex interplay of lip-reading and prosody (speech rhythm and tone) cues, and that rehabilitation addressing multimodal emotion perception may be warranted.
Emotion perception is a real-world communicative need rarely targeted in hearing device fitting or aural rehabilitation, and this study highlights specific multimodal processing gaps in CI and HA users that could guide future rehabilitation priorities.
- 01Study tested Mandarin-speaking adults using either hearing aids (HA) or cochlear implants (CI).
- 02Examined how word meaning (semantics), speech tone (prosody), and face cues interact for emotion recognition.
- 03CI and HA users showed distinct patterns of reliance on different cue types.
- 04Facial cues played a significant compensatory role when auditory cues were degraded.
- 05Findings have direct implications for multimodal aural rehabilitation in tonal language users.
Mandarin-speaking adults with hearing aids or cochlear implants use semantics, prosody, and facial cues interactively during emotion word processing.
studysupportedFacial cues serve a compensatory function in emotional speech perception for hearing device users when auditory prosodic cues are degraded.
studypartially supported- PMID
- 42954669
- DOI
- 10.1097/AUD.0000000000001909.
- Journal
- Ear and Hearing
- Publication type
- research_article
- Evidence level
- 2b
- Population
- Mandarin-speaking adults with hearing aids or cochlear implants
- Intervention
- Emotion word processing tasks with manipulated semantic, prosodic, and facial cue conditions
- Comparator
- Normal-hearing Mandarin-speaking adults (implied control group)
Primary outcomes
Emotion word recognition accuracy; Relative contribution of semantic, prosodic, and facial cues to emotion perception