CRNL conference of Monita Chatterjee "Emotional prosody and cochlear implants"

As a neural prosthesis, the cochlear implant (CI) has achieved phenomenal success in restoring speech communication to patients worldwide. The electrical stimuli transmitted by the device, however, does not relay sound information with sufficient resolution in the frequency or in the time domains to support the perception of complex harmonic pitch (i.e., the pitch of the human voice, or of musical instruments, birdsong, etc). Thus, CI patients show significant impairments in the perception of music, as well as in the ability to correctly identify pitch-dominant prosodic cues in speech. These prosodic cues are crucial for the perception of the emotion in a talker’s voice. Deficits in vocal emotion perception have been linked to reduced quality of life in both children and adults with CIs. Pediatric CI recipients also show deficits in the ability to communicate emotions in their production of speech prosody. In this presentation, I will describe our work on the communication of emotional prosody by CI patients.