Recognition of emotional prosody by Mandarin-speaking adults with cochlear implants.

To understand how cochlear implant processing affects emotional prosody recognition in tonal languages, how normal-hearing (NH) and cochlear-implanted (CI) adults identify four emotions ("angry," "happy," "sad," and "neutral") in short, semantically neutral, Mandarin sentences are compared. Depending on hearing status (CI, NH), adults heard natural speech and/or noise-vocoded speech conditions (4-, 8-, and 16-spectral channels). Results suggest that Mandarin-speaking adults with CIs recognize emotions with similar accuracy as NH listeners attending to spectrally degraded (4-channel) vocoded speech. The accuracy noted for Mandarin appears to be lower than that described in previous studies of English.