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Cochlear Implants (CIs) have restored access to sound for many individuals with severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss. While extensive research has addressed speech perception outcomes, remarkably little is known about how CI users perceive nonverbal socio-emotional signals such as emotion, speaker identity, gender, or age. This gap is critical, as the ability to decode such cues can be very important for quality of life (QoL), both in children and older adult CI users (e.g., [1], [2].

We report preliminary results from an ongoing project aimed at developing a comprehensive diagnostic framework to assess a broad range of communicative auditory abilities and their relation to QoL. In 19 CI users and 11 normal-hearing controls, we assessed performance across four domains of voice perception (emotion, identity, gender, age), as well as speech comprehension, music perception, and self-reported measures. The test battery comprised new psychometrically validated tests (speaker identity: JVLMT – Humble et al., 2023; speech comprehension: JESSCom – von Eiff et al., 2024) and established experimental paradigms (emotion: von Eiff et al., 2022; speaker gender and age: Skuk et al., 2020) to obtain individual diagnostic profiles of participants. Additional assessments included the PROMS (Law & Zentner, 2012) for musical skills and the WHOQoL-BREF [3] for quality of life.

Results showed significant group-level impairments of CI users across most auditory domains – except for musical rhythm – but also a rich pattern of individual profiles. These will provide detailed insights into both dissociations and correlative associations among communicative sub-skills in CI users, and into their individual and combined relation to quality of life with a CI.

We conclude that, with continued data collection, this multidimensional approach promises to inform individualized rehabilitation strategies and guide future priorities in CI signal processing and design.

Literatur

[1] Schweinberger SR, von Eiff CI. Enhancing socio-emotional communication and quality of life in young cochlear implant recipients: Perspectives from parameter-specific morphing and caricaturing. Front Neurosci. 2022 Aug 25;16:956917. DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2022.956917
[2] von Eiff CI, Skuk VG, Zäske R, Nussbaum C, Frühholz S, Feuer U, Guntinas-Lichius O, Schweinberger SR. Parameter-Specific Morphing Reveals Contributions of Timbre to the Perception of Vocal Emotions in Cochlear Implant Users. Ear Hear. 2022 Jul-Aug 01;43(4):1178-1188. DOI: 10.1097/AUD.0000000000001181
[3] Skevington SM, Lotfy M, O'Connell KA; WHOQOL Group. The World Health Organization's WHOQOL-BREF quality of life assessment: psychometric properties and results of the international field trial. A report from the WHOQOL group. Qual Life Res. 2004 Mar;13(2):299-310. DOI: 10.1023/B:QURE.0000018486.91360.00