Vocal Emotion Communication With Cochlear Implants

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.

NCT Number	NCT05486637
Lead Sponsor	Father Flanagan's Boys' Home Collaborators: Arizona State University, House Institute Foundation, University of Nebraska, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR)
Conditions	Cochlear Hearing Loss
Enrollment	255 participants
Start Date	2022-07-01
Primary Completion	2027-06-30 (estimated)
Study Completion	2027-06-30 (estimated)
Updated on ClinicalTrials.gov	2025-09-19