Monita Chatterjee, Ph.D.
Professor, Dept of Communication Sciences & Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
How children with cochlear implants perceive and produce emotional speech prosody
Cochlear implant technology provides many children with severe/profound hearing loss the ability to hear sounds and acquire spoken language. However, some aspects of sounds such as the pitch of voices or musical instruments, are not conveyed well through the device. This leads to deficits in the communication of pitch-dominant information in speech, such as question/statement contrasts, speaker identification, lexical tones, and emotional information. In this presentation, I will describe our research team’s work on how school age children with cochlear implants perceive spoken emotions, predictors of individual variability in their outcomes, and links between their perception and production of emotions in speech.