Utilization of acoustic cues to identify emotional prosody: Results in adults with normal hearing or cochlear implants

Emotional prosody is a dominant source of information about a talker’s intended emotion. Multiple acoustic cues contrast different emotions. Voice pitch is a dominant acoustic cue for prosody, but individuals with cochlear implants do not have adequate access to this cue. Previous work has suggested that older individuals with normal hearing also have limited access to dynamic voice pitch contour cues. We are developing a cue-weighting method to estimate perceptual weighting of different prosodic cues in emotion identification by listeners with cochlear implants or normal hearing. Initial analyses indicate that in adult normally hearing listeners, increasing age reduces their weighting of voice pitch cues to emotion, but not their weighting of the secondary cue of duration. The perceptual weight for voice pitch is reduced when normally hearing listeners are attending to spectrally degraded (noise band vocoded) stimuli. Consistent with the latter observation, cochlear implant patients showed reduced weighting of voice pitch cues compared to normally hearing counterparts when both are attending to original (clean) stimuli. Taken together, these results suggest that increasing age and spectral degradation both reduce listeners’ ability to utilize voice pitch cues to emotional contrasts.