RecruitingEarly Phase 1NCT05486637

Vocal Emotion Communication With Cochlear Implants

Perception and Production of Emotional Prosody With Cochlear Implants


Sponsor

Father Flanagan's Boys' Home

Enrollment

255 participants

Start Date

Jul 1, 2022

Study Type

INTERVENTIONAL

Conditions

Summary

Patients with hearing loss who use cochlear implants (CIs) show significant deficits and strong unexplained intersubject variability in their perception and production of spoken emotions in speech. This project will investigate the hypothesis that "cue-weighting", or how patients utilize the different acoustic cues to emotion, accounts for significant variance in emotional communication with CIs. The results will focus on children with CIs, but parallel measures in postlingually deaf adults with CIs will be made, ensuring that results of these studies benefit social communication by CI patients across the lifespan by informing the development of technological innovations and improved clinical protocols.


Eligibility

Min Age: 6 YearsMax Age: 80 Years

Inclusion Criteria4

  • Prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants
  • Postlingually deaf adults with cochlear implants
  • Normally hearing children
  • Normally hearing adults

Exclusion Criteria3

  • Non-native speakers of American English
  • Prelingually deaf individuals who receive cochlear implants after age 12
  • Adults unable to pass a basic cognitive screen

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Interventions

BEHAVIORALPerception of acoustic cues to emotion

Using novel methodologies and stimuli comprising both controlled laboratory recordings and materials culled from databases of ecologically valid speech emotions (e.g., from publicly available podcasts), the team aims to collect perceptual data to build a statistical model to test the hypothesis that experience-based changes in emotion identification by pediatric and adult CI recipients is mediated by improvements in cue-optimization.

BEHAVIORALProduction of acoustic cues to emotion

The team will acoustically analyze vocal emotion productions by participants, quantify acoustic features of spoken emotions, and obtain behavioral measures of how well normally hearing listeners can identify those emotions.


Locations(4)

Arizona State University

Tempe, Arizona, United States

House Institute Foundation

Los Angeles, California, United States

Northwestern University

Evanston, Illinois, United States

Boys Town National Research Hospital

Omaha, Nebraska, United States

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NCT05486637


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