https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4440-7692
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Abstract
Objective
In daily life, failure to perceive emotional expressions can result in maladjusted behaviour. For cochlear implant users, perceiving emotional cues in sounds remains challenging, and the factors explaining the variability in patients' sensitivity to emotions are currently poorly understood. Understanding how these factors relate to auditory proficiency is a major challenge of cochlear implant research and is critical in addressing patients' limitations.
Design
To fill this gap, we evaluated different auditory perception aspects in implant users (pitch discrimination, music processing and speech intelligibility) and correlated them to their performance in an emotion recognition task.
Study sample
Eighty-four adults (18–76 years old) participated in our investigation; 42 cochlear implant users and 42 controls. Cochlear implant users performed worse than their controls on all tasks, and emotion perception abilities were correlated to their age and their clinical outcome as measured in the speech intelligibility task.
Results
As previously observed, emotion perception abilities declined with age (here by about 2–3% in a decade). Interestingly, even when emotional stimuli were musical, CI users’ skills relied more on processes underlying speech intelligibility.
Conclusions
These results suggest that speech processing remains a clinical priority even when one is interested in affective skills.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by an NSERC Discovery grant to AL. AL received salary support from FRQS Junior 2. We are grateful to all the participants for their time and effort. SP was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship from l’Institut de Valorisation des Données (IVADO). We want to thank Christiane Schultz, Ph.D., for her support and hard work with the participants' assessments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).