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Vocal Emotion Recognition in Cochlear Implant Users: An over-Reliance on Semantic Cues

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Cassandra Neumann^1,2 (cassandra.neumann12@gmail.com), Jade Carrière^1,2, Mickael Deroche^1,2; ¹Concordia University, ²The Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music – CRBLM

The ability to infer emotions in speech is linked to improved social development, communication, and empathy. Listeners typically use prosodic (loudness, pitch, rhythm) and semantic (literal meaning) cues to discern emotions in speech. These cues can conflict in daily conversation, e.g., sarcasm, where the prosody contradicts the literal content. Cochlear implant (CI) users face challenges in interpreting sarcastic speech, as CIs deliver degraded acoustic cues, especially pitch, which is crucial for recognizing emotional prosody. As a result, CI users might rely more on semantic cues when these cues conflict, missing vital information. This study aims to better understand the difficulties experienced by CI users by presenting sentences that are either congruent (e.g., semantically happy sentence with happy prosody) or incongruent (e.g., semantically happy sentence with sad prosody) in two experiments: 1. identify the emotion conveyed by prosody, ignoring semantics; 2. identify the emotion from semantics, ignoring prosody. We hypothesize that CI users would struggle to identify emotions using prosody (Experiment 1), resulting in a larger interference effect (greater performance difference between congruent and incongruent trials) but would more easily identify emotions using semantics (Experiment 2), resulting in a smaller interference effect, compared to normal hearing controls. Preliminary findings confirm that CI users have overall poorer performance than NH controls, and perhaps larger interference effects in both experiments, suggesting a rather general difficulty to direct their attention to the intended cue.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions