Enhancing socio-emotional communication and quality of life in young cochlear implant recipients: Perspectives from parameter-specific morphing and caricaturing

The use of digitally modified stimuli with enhanced diagnostic information to improve verbal communication in children with sensory or central handicaps was pioneered by Tallal and colleagues in 1996, who targeted speech comprehension in language-learning impaired children. Today, researchers are aware that successful communication cannot be reduced to linguistic information—it depends strongly on the quality of communication, including non-verbal socio-emotional communication. In children with cochlear implants (CIs), quality of life (QoL) is affected, but this can be related to the ability to recognize emotions in a voice rather than speech comprehension alone. In this manuscript, we describe a family of new methods, termed parameter-specific facial and vocal morphing . We propose that these provide novel perspectives for assessing sensory determinants of human communication, but also for enhancing socio-emotional communication and QoL in the context of sensory handicaps, via training with digitally enhanced, caricatured stimuli. Based on promising initial results with various target groups including people with age-related macular degeneration, people with low abilities to recognize faces, older people, and adult CI users, we discuss chances and challenges for perceptual training interventions for young CI users based on enhanced auditory stimuli, as well as perspectives for CI sound processing technology.