Health TrialsbyHealthPanel

Vocal Emotion Communication With Cochlear Implants

ConditionCochlear Hearing Loss
Trial statusRecruiting
Trial phaseEarly Phase 1
Trial typeInterventional
Biological sexAll
Age6-80
SponsorFather Flanagan's Boys' Home

About this trial

Patients with hearing loss who use cochlear implants (CIs) show significant deficits and strong unexplained intersubject variability in their perception and production of spoken emotions in speech. This project will investigate the hypothesis that "cue-weighting", or how patients utilize the different acoustic cues to emotion, accounts for significant variance in emotional communication with CIs. The results will focus on children with CIs, but parallel measures in postlingually deaf adults with CIs will be made, ensuring that results of these studies benefit social communication by CI patients across the lifespan by informing the development of technological innovations and improved clinical protocols.

Eligibility criteria

This trial accepts healthy volunteers

Qualifiers

Prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants

Postlingually deaf adults with cochlear implants

Normally hearing children

Normally hearing adults

Disqualifiers

Non-native speakers of American English

Prelingually deaf individuals who receive cochlear implants after age 12

Adults unable to pass a basic cognitive screen

Trial design

Design model

Single group

Treatments tested in this trial

  • Perception of acoustic cues to emotion

    Behavioral

    Using novel methodologies and stimuli comprising both controlled laboratory recordings and materials culled from databases of ecologically valid speech emotions (e.g., from publicly available podcasts), the team aims to collect perceptual data to build a statistical model to test the hypothesis that experience-based changes in emotion identification by pediatric and adult CI recipients is mediated by improvements in cue-optimization.

  • Production of acoustic cues to emotion

    Behavioral

    The team will acoustically analyze vocal emotion productions by participants, quantify acoustic features of spoken emotions, and obtain behavioral measures of how well normally hearing listeners can identify those emotions.

Treatment groups

255 Participants
are divided into 1 treatment group
Group A: Vocal emotion communication by children and adults with cochlear implants or normal hearingExperimental treatment 2 interventions

Trial outcomes

Primary outcomes

1

Vocal emotion recognition accuracy

Percent correct scores in vocal emotion recognition

Time frame
Years 1-5
2

Vocal emotion recognition sensitivity

Sensitivity (d's) in vocal emotion recognition

Time frame
Years 1-5
3

Voice pitch (fundamental frequency) of vocal productions

Voice pitch (Hz) measured from acoustic analyses of recorded speech

Time frame
Years 1-5
4

Intensity of vocal productions

Intensity (decibel units) measured from acoustic analyses of recorded speech

Time frame
Years 1-5

Secondary outcomes

1

Reactions times (seconds) for vocal emotion identification

Time between the end of the stimulus recording and the response (button press)

Time frame
Years 1-5

Other outcomes

Sponsors and contacts

Click on the lead sponsor to view all of their trials.

Father Flanagan's Boys' Home

Lead sponsor

Arizona State University

Collaborator

House Institute Foundation

Collaborator

University of Nebraska

Collaborator

National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)

Collaborator

Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR)

Collaborator

Source ClinicalTrials.gov
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