Vocal emotion recognition by native Turkish children with normal hearing and with hearing aids

Development of vocal emotion recognition in children with normal hearing takes many years before reaching adult-like levels. In children with hearing loss, decreased audibility and potential loss of sensitivity to relevant acoustic cues may additionally affect vocal emotion perception. Hearing aids (HAs) are traditionally optimized for speech understanding, and it is not clear how children with HAs are performing in perceiving vocal emotions. In this study, we investigated vocal emotion recognition in native Turkish normal hearing children (NHC, age range: 5–18 years), normal hearing adults (NHA, age range: 18–45 years), and children with HAs (HAC, age range: 5–18 years), using pseudo-speech sentences expressed in one of the three emotions, happy, sad, or angry (Geneva Multimodal Emotion Portrayal (GEMEP) Corpus by Banziger and Scherer, 2010; EmoHI Test by Nagels et al., 2021). Visual inspection of the preliminary data suggests that performance increases with increasing age for NHC and that in general, HAC have lower recognition scores compared to NHC. Further analyses will be presented, along with acoustical analysis of the stimuli and an exploration of effects of HA settings. In addition, for cross-language comparison, these data will be compared to previously collected data with the same paradigm in children from the UK and the Netherlands.