Citation

Most T, Michaelis H. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 2012; 55(4): 1148-1162.

Affiliation

Tel-Aviv University, Israel.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association)

DOI

10.1044/1092-4388(2011/11-0060)

PMID

22271872

Abstract

PURPOSE: This study aimed to investigate the effect of hearing loss (HL) on emotion perception ability among young children with and without HL. METHOD: A total of 26 children aged 4-6.6 years with prelingual sensory-neural HL ranging from moderate to profound and 14 children with normal hearing (NH) participated. They were asked to identify happiness, anger, sadness, and fear expressed by an actress when uttering the same neutral nonsense sentence. Their auditory, visual, and auditory-visual perception of the emotional content were assessed. RESULTS: The accuracy of emotion perception among children with HL was lower than that of the NH children in all three conditions: auditory, visual, and auditory-visual. Perception through the combined auditory-visual mode significantly surpassed the auditory or visual modes alone, in both groups, indicating that children with HL utilized the auditory information for emotion perception. No significant differences in perception emerged according to degree of HL. In addition, children with profound HL and cochlear implants did not perform differently from children with less severe HL who used hearing aids. CONCLUSIONS: The relatively high accuracy of emotion perception by children with HL may be explained by their intensive rehabilitation, which emphasizes suprasegmental and paralinguistic aspects of verbal communication.

Language: en