Language Effects on Emotion Recognition in Hearing Children and Deaf Children with Cochlear Implants

Abstract

In an increasingly multicultural society, perception and understanding of emotions expressed by talkers across different languages are important for meaningful and effective social communication. The purpose of this study is to examine language effects on listeners’  ability to recognize emotions, specifically in individuals who speak English as their first language. Another goal is to understand how emotion recognition across languages is impacted by hearing loss in deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs). –. Children will listen to sentences spoken in English and Yorùbá and identify whether the talker is happy, sad, angry, or neutral. Tonal languages such as Yorùbá are characterized by more variance in pitch compared to stress-based languages such as English. Therefore, we predict that children with CIs whose first language is English will have more difficulty recognizing emotions in Yorùbá than in English. This is due to the lack of pitch information transmitted by cochlear implants, which would interfere with their ability to perceive emotion. The findings will have implications in expanding our knowledge about the perception of emotions in different language contexts and may have practical implications for improving the rehabilitative outcomes of young CI users.

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Tara Vongpaisal