Voice emotion perception and production in cochlear implant users

- Voice emotion is a fundamental component of human social interaction and development.
- Cochlear implant (CI) users are forced to interface with highly degraded prosodic cues.
- CI users demonstrate significant difficulty in recognizing and producing voice emotions.
- Aural rehabilitation and music training may improve prosody perception.

Voice emotion is a fundamental component of human social interaction and social development. Unfortunately, cochlear implant users are often forced to interface with highly degraded prosodic cues as a result of device constraints in extraction, processing, and transmission. As such, individuals with cochlear implants frequently demonstrate significant difficulty in recognizing voice emotions in comparison to their normal hearing counterparts. Cochlear implant-mediated perception and production of voice emotion is an important but relatively understudied area of research. However, a rich understanding of the voice emotion auditory processing offers opportunities to improve upon CI biomedical design and to develop training programs benefiting CI performance. In this review, we will address the issues, current literature, and future directions for improved voice emotion processing in cochlear implant users.