Aging impairs the perception of emotional prosody in cochlear implant patients

It has been known for some time that people with normal hearing have age-related decline in both facial and voice emotion perception. In a paper in Ear & Hearing published this year (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34406157/), we reported that adult postlingually deaf cochlear implant patients also show age-related decline in their ability to identify emotional prosody. Normally hearing people hear the primary cues to emotional prosody quite differently from cochlear implant patients. What might account for these aging effects? We are currently conducting research into the acoustic cues utilized by cochlear implant patients and normally hearing listeners to identify emotional prosody, how their utilization of these cues changes with age, and the extent to which cognitive status might play a role in these aging effects. We are also collaborating with Dr. Shuman He's lab at the Ohio State University and Dr. Zielong Xie's lab at Florida State University to examine cortical underpinnings of the observed effects. At Boys Town, we are collaborating with Dr. Adam Bosen's lab to study effects of cognition, and with Dr. Kaylah Lalonde's lab to study audiovisual integration of emotional information in speech.

Social Justice In Science

Together with Drs. Shauntelle Cannon, Anahita Mehta, Lina Reiss, J Tilak Ratnanather, Viral Tejani, and Tanvi Thakkar, I initiated the BIPOC-CSD network, a network built for and by people of color working in the general area of Communication Sciences and Disorders. We are currently writing a grant application to support our efforts. Here is an interesting paper I read recently on the "Diversity-Innovation" problem: long story short, women and minority scientists innovate more but those innovations don't get cited/propagated in their fields, so the world loses out on these innovations. It's absolutely URGENT to change the mindsets of the majority community, the visibility of BIPOC scientists, clinicians, and engineers, and the opportunities available to them at all levels. Here is a link to our current page on the BIPOC-CSD network: https://www.monitachatterjee.com/bipoc-csd

New Efforts..

New grant! After a couple of years of trying, our R01 grant application was scored so well that you can't really get much better of a score, so we're excited to get going on our proposed experiments. We will investigate the links between perception and production of emotional prosody in children with cochlear implants, predictors of outcomes, and underlying mechanisms.

New lab! We're excited to be moving to a new and bigger lab space. This has been in the works for a year or more, but delays due to the pandemic have stalled progress. Things are looking better every day though, and we are pretty sure we'll be transitioning during the summer.