Q
Emotion in speech – words are not enough Does someone’s ability to hear a speech signal give us all the information we need? We can all agree that knowing a talker’s emotional state is important information for a listener. Unfortunately, when it comes to hearing aid benefits, little is known about how hearing aids affect users’ perception of emotion in speech.
A recent study that looked at how hearing aid use affected the perception of emotion in speech and the recognition of speech spoken with emotion. Interestingly, they found that the use of hearing aids improved listeners’ word recognition performance from 43% correct (unaided) to 68% correct (aided), but that hearing aids did not improve listeners’ ability to identify emotions (38% unaided, compared to 40% aided). In short, hearing aids improved the recognition of what was spoken but hearing aids did not improve the listeners’ ability to identify the emotion being conveyed.
Since this study, several colleagues from Ryerson University and Phonak AG developed a questionnaire that would allow us to measure hearing handicap related to affective (emotion) speech. The questionnaire they developed, called the Emotional Communication in Hearing Questionnaire (EMO-CHeQ), includes 17 items such as, “I find it difficult to identify the emotions of people speaking on television”.
When they assessed the questionnaire, it was found that, on average, adults with hearing impairment experience handicap when listening to emotion in speech and current generation hearing aids do not appear to address this performance deficit. Even more remarkable was that when they looked at people who are very satisfied with their hearing aids, there wasn’t less auditory emotion hearing handicap for this group.
To some extent, this is not too surprising because the focus of hearing instrument research, to date, has more focused on optimizing speech intelligibility and sound quality rather than emotion identification. Importantly, this new research presents us with an important new outcome measure to assess improvements with emotion identification.