Perception of vocal emotional prosody in children with hearing impairment.

Purpose: The study aimed at testing the effect of supra segmental training on vocal emotional prosody perception of children with hearing impairment. The objectives of the study were to compare the perception of vocal emotional prosody (happy, sad, and neutral) in children with hearing impairment with and without a short-term prosody training and to draw correlations between the vocal emotional prosody perception scores and the subject factors - chronological age, age of hearing aid fitting, duration of the intensive intervention (speech, language and auditory training without breaks more than 30 days) and language age in children with hearing impairment.

Method: Thirty children with hearing impairment in the age range of 4.1-9.2 years with a language age of 3-7 years participated in the study. The authors formulated 24 concrete Malayalam sentences and their picture representations and these were recorded under three emotional variations (happy, sad, and neutral). Using random sampling, the thirty participants were divided into the control group (CWHI) and the experimental (CWHIt) group. The study was carried out in two phases; phase 1 (training) attended by only the experimental group and phase 2 (testing) attended by both the groups.

Results: There was a significant difference between CWHI and CWHIt in the happy, sad, and neutral vocal emotional prosody conditions. Chronological age, duration of speech-language-auditory training, and language age showed a positive correlation with the vocal emotional prosody perception scores; and no correlation was found between the age of fitting of hearing aids and the emotion perception scores.

Conclusion: The results of the study points out that with adequate prosody training, the children with hearing impairment using benefiting hearing aids could improve their vocal emotional prosody perception. Owing to the role of prosody perception in speech & language, social and cognitive development, the supra segmental training should be made an integral part of the assessment and management intervention strategies.