Hearing aids improve intelligibility but may not restore emotion perception

Evidence

Although hearing aids clearly improve speech intelligibility, it is unclear to what extent hearing aids sufficiently restore information needed for emotion perception in speech. … Several studies with severely hearing-impaired children and adolescents indicate that aided hearing-impaired listeners perform poorly compared to their normal-hearing peers when rating affective prosody in speech (Most et al. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1351

Everyday communication settings, however, may frequently deprive the listener of visual information, (e.g., during a telephone conversation) so that listeners have to rely on auditory information only. … Although hearing aids clearly improve speech intelligibility, it is unclear to what extent hearing aids sufficiently restore information needed for emotion perception in speech. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1353

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme across the literature that intelligibility and emotion perception are dissociable in hearing loss — links to the reader’s chapter on hearing-aid physiology in this same volume.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1351; Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1353