Comparing implanted school aged children with their normal hearing peers in inferencing mood from voice by using linguistic and paralinguistic cues

The aim of the present study find out ability of mood inference from voice by using the linguistic and paralinguistic cues of implanted children. Twenty children with cochlear implant and 40 normal hearing school aged children participated to study and all of data were collected from children whose parents signed out informed consent form. The six facial expression cards portraying six basic emotions (anger, happiness, surprise, sadness, fear and disgust) and two distractor emotions (shame and contempt) were prepeared. Age relevant context dependent and context independent sentences were prepeared. Both expression cards and sentences were used to evaluate the ability of mood inference from voice. Pearson Chi Square Test was used for the differences between group analysis, and when the expected percentage of cells were lower than 5%, p values of Fisher's Exact Test were concluded. Mc Nemar Test was used for intra-group difference analysis. SPSS 15.0 Statistic Package Programme was used for the data analysis. The result of the study revealed that children with normal hearing were more succesful at identifying the emotions through voice than children with cochlear implant, and children with cochlear implant were not able to use context to identify the inferencing mood from voice.