Prosody perception and production by children with cochlear implants

The perception and production of emotional and linguistic (focus) prosody were
compared in children with cochlear implants (CI) and normally hearing (NH) peers.
Thirteen CI and thirteen hearing-age-matched school-aged NH children were tested, as
baseline, on non-verbal emotion understanding, non-word repetition, and stimulus
identification and naming. Main tests were verbal emotion discrimination, verbal focus
position discrimination, acted emotion production, and focus production. Productions
were evaluated by NH adult Dutch listeners. All scores between groups were
comparable, except a lower score for the CI group for non-word repetition. Emotional
prosody perception and production scores correlated weakly for CI children but were
uncorrelated for NH children. In general, hearing age weakly predicted emotion
production but not perception. Non-verbal emotional (but not linguistic)
understanding predicted CI children’s (but not controls’) emotion perception and
production. In conclusion, increasing time in sound might facilitate vocal emotional
expression, possibly requiring independently maturing emotion perception skills.