The perception of speakers emotions by hard of hearing children and adolescents

This is a first installment in newly initiated studies of the speech perception of the hearing impaired. The aim of this study was to assess the ability of hard of hearing children and adolescents to interpret, through spoken, language, the emotional state of the speaker. Hard of hearing subjects were compared to normal listeners on a test of identifying emotions in speech. It was found, as expected from earlier research, that the hearing impaired subjects were considerably less sure of how to interpret the speech signal in terms of the emotions of the speaker than young adult listeners with normal hearing. It was also found that the loud speech often used in every day communication with the hearing impaired is associated with the emotion ”angry” by both hard of hearing and normal subjects. A moderate correlation was found between degree of hearing loss and the ability to identify the emotional content of speech. Introduction One of the most serious consequences of hearing impairment is the difficulty in understanding spoken language due to the reduced reception of signal dependent information. This information, represented by the acoustic structure of the speech signal, has several important functions in spoken communication. Acoustic cues are used primarily to decode the speech signal and thereby accomplish lexical access. The speech signal also contains cues to the pragmatic interpretation of the spoken message. These cues provide the listener with knowledge about the communicative situation which is crucial to well functioning social interaction. This paper is concerned with the listener’s reception of the emotions of the speaker. Recognizing the attitudes and moods of a speaker in a dialog situation is an integral factor in a successful linguistic and social exchange. a hearing impaired listener therefore runs the risk of not only unsuccessfully decoding the semantic content of the speakers utterance what the speaker intends to convey, but also the speakers current emotional state conveyed by how it is conveyed. There have been several attempts to establish the phonetic means by which emotional content in utterances is transmitted. The main interest in this issue has been from speech technology. In this work the perceptual relevance of various parameters to emotional impressions has been studied.(Carlson, Granström and Nord, 1992; Mozziconacci, 1995). An important investigation of the ability of hearing impaired listeners to recognize the mood of the speaker was done by the handicap research group at KTH (Risberg and Agelfors, 1978, Öster and Risberg, 1986). In this work the authors were concerned with the ability of hard of hearing individuals to recognize emotions and with which prosodic features were most important for their recognition. The present paper is a first installment in a project