Discrimination of emotional and linguistic prosody with cochlear implant simulations

In cochlear implants (CI), temporal sound features are more successfully transmitted than spectral sound features. This could have consequences for the perception of prosody. This was tested for emotion vs. focus perception in simulated CI hearing, starting from the assumption that for emotional prosody spectral (F0) features are more important than for focus prosody. Sets of short Dutch phrases were recorded with neutral, emotional (happy and sad) and focused (e.g., 'a BLUE ball' vs. 'a blue BALL') prosody. Temporal or spectral prosody, or both, were crossspliced from the non-neutral to the neutral utterances, thus controlling for the usable phonetic cues. 17 Dutch subjects identified intended emotions and focus for vocoded (CI-simulated) and unvocoded versions of the phrases. A benefit of F0 vs. temporal information was found for emotional, but not for focus prosody. This could imply that CI users have more trouble hearing emotional than linguistic (focus) prosody.