• Journal of Music and Human Behavior
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.29-47
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• 2024

The purpose of this study was to investigate how children with cochlear implants (CI) perceive emotion in music depending on mode and tempo cues, and to compare them to NH children. Participants in this study included 13 CI children who were implanted with either unilateral or bilateral cochlear implants aged between 7 and 13 years, 36 NH children, and 20 NH adults. The musical stimuli used in this study were piano recordings in either major or minor mode, with tempos of 130 bpm and 56 bpm. A comparison of the emotion perception levels of NH children and NH adults before the experiment showed that there was no significant difference between the two groups. Meanwhile, the way they perceive different emotions from each music condition varies, in that CI children perceived all music conditions except as happy, while NH children perceived music in a major key as happy and music in a minor key as sad. It supports that CI children tend to rely primarily on tempo cues to process and identify emotional information from music, which is contrary to NH children. It is important to note that this study enhanced and specified the understanding of how CI children perceive music emotion and use specific musical elements in the process. These findings indicate baseline data on emotion perception in music in CI children.