Perception of emotional music by children with cochlear implants reveals developmental plasticity

Cochlear implants provide poor access to the frequency components needed to accurately identify emotional music and speech. Nonetheless, a series of studies revealed that children with cochlear implants develop unique strategies to identify emotion in music. Although musical changes were difficult for them to detect, children with cochlear implants responded most accurately to rhythmic changes and also relied mainly on temporal information to judge whether music was happy or sad. By contrast, mode (frequency) information dominated perception of musical emotion in typically developing children and was used more clearly by bimodal device users (cochlear implant in one ear with acoustic hearing in the other) than children with bilateral deafness using unilateral or bilateral cochlear implants. Mode became the more dominant cue with increasing residual hearing in the non-implanted ear. Children with unilateral cochlear implants showed prolonged response times relative to a control group of normal hearing peers while judging whether music was happy or sad. Response times in children with bimodal devices and bilateral cochlear implants were more similar to controls. Together, these results demonstrate development of novel strategies for music listening and perception of emotion in music based on available cues in children with cochlear implants and suggest that these strategies require cognitive resource.