1 International Laboratory for Brain Music and Sound Research, Department of Psychology, University of Montréal, Montreal, Canada.
2 Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
3 Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
4 Laboratory for Hearing and Cognition, Psychology Department, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.
5 Cochlear Implant Group, School of Medicine, Hospital das Clínicas, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Canada.

Objective: In daily life, failure to perceive emotional expressions can result in maladjusted behaviour. For cochlear implant users, perceiving emotional cues in sounds remains challenging, and the factors explaining the variability in patients' sensitivity to emotions are currently poorly understood. Understanding how these factors relate to auditory proficiency is a major challenge of cochlear implant research and is critical in addressing patients' limitations.

Design: To fill this gap, we evaluated different auditory perception aspects in implant users (pitch discrimination, music processing and speech intelligibility) and correlated them to their performance in an emotion recognition task.

Study sample: Eighty-four adults (18-76 years old) participated in our investigation; 42 cochlear implant users and 42 controls. Cochlear implant users performed worse than their controls on all tasks, and emotion perception abilities were correlated to their age and their clinical outcome as measured in the speech intelligibility task.

Results: As previously observed, emotion perception abilities declined with age (here by about 2-3% in a decade). Interestingly, even when emotional stimuli were musical, CI users' skills relied more on processes underlying speech intelligibility.

Conclusions: These results suggest that speech processing remains a clinical priority even when one is interested in affective skills.