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Perception of Emotional Expression in Cochlear Implant Users| title | Perception of Emotional Expression in Cochlear Implant Users |
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| start_date | 2024/10/21 |
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| schedule | 15h15 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | Room B10 |
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| summary | Speech comprehension is often regarded as a benchmark outcome of cochlear implants (CIs), but this disregards the communicative importance of non-verbal social-communicative vocal signals. In this talk, I will address the underexamined area of vocal emotion perception in CI users, a skill closely linked to their quality of life. I will present my research on how CI users recognize vocal emotions and the effects of facial information on this ability.
Using state-of-the-art voice morphing methods, the research shows that CI users perform lower in vocal emotion perception than biologically hearing (BH) individuals, with large interindividual differences between CI users. While BH individuals use both timbre and fundamental frequency information to equivalent degrees when recognizing vocal emotions, CI users are more efficient in using timbre (compared to fundamental frequency) information for the same task. This finding demonstrates that CI devices can efficiently transmit timbre signals. To improve emotion perception in CI users, a perceptual training program with vocal caricatures as training stimuli was developed, showing promising effectiveness. Furthermore, CI users exhibit stronger benefits to vocal emotion perception if time-synchronized congruent facial emotional information is available, compared to BH individuals. These larger crossmodal benefits are maintained even at equal auditory-only performance levels, suggesting that these benefits result from deafness-related compensation rather than degraded acoustic representations.
The research underscores the connection between vocal emotion perception and quality of life in CI users and suggests that audio-visual stimuli should be integrated into CI rehabilitation programs. |
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| responsibles | Allen |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2024/10/16 12:45 UTC |
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