Facial expression recognition: can preschoolers with cochlear implants and hearing aids catch it?
Hearing-impaired preschoolers need explicit facial expression training - add emotion recognition activities to early intervention programs.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Wang et al. (2011) watched preschoolers look at photos of happy, sad, angry and surprised faces. Some kids wore cochlear implants or hearing aids. Others had normal hearing.
The team asked each child to point to the face that matched a feeling word. They timed answers and counted mistakes.
What they found
Children with hearing aids or cochlear implants scored much lower than their hearing peers. They often mixed up happy with surprised, or sad with angry.
The gap showed up on every emotion. The authors call it a clear social-perceptual delay.
How this fits with other research
Rieffe et al. (2017) saw the same pattern in preschoolers who only had language delays. Both studies point to early emotion-reading trouble, even when the cause differs.
Romero (2017) offers hope. After brief computer lessons, three preschoolers with social deficits learned to read faces and still used the skill one month later. The 2011 paper shows the need; the 2017 paper shows a fix.
Long et al. (2025) tracked eye movements in older hearing-impaired kids. They still looked at faces less accurately than hearing peers, proving the lag does not fade on its own.
Why it matters
If you serve deaf or hard-of-hearing preschoolers, add quick emotion games to your session. Flash cards, mirror play, or tablet apps that say “find the happy face” work. Five minutes a day can close a gap that otherwise lingers into elementary school.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Tager-Flusberg and Sullivan (2000) presented a cognitive model of theory of mind (ToM), in which they thought ToM included two components--a social-perceptual component and a social-cognitive component. Facial expression recognition (FER) is an ability tapping the social-perceptual component. Previous findings suggested that normal hearing children did not demonstrate any advantage over those with cochlear implants (CI) or hearing aids (HA) in FER with age and gender matched. In these studies, the ages of the participants with CI or HA were over 7 years old. However, normal hearing preschoolers can accurately recognize basic facial expressions. Children's early FER skills are essential to later successful social interactions. It is not clear whether preschoolers with CI or HA have problems in FER. Two experiments were conducted to compare the FER of preschoolers with CI or HA with normal hearing children (with age matched). The results of both experiments consistently showed that normal hearing children performed significantly better than those with CI or HA, suggesting to some extent that there was a delay in preschoolers with CI or HA on FER. No significant correlations (with age and type of participants controlled) were found between language ability (measured by PPVT) and FER in Experiment 2, to some extent validating a cognitive model of ToM in another view. The findings suggested that earlier rehabilitation for children with CI or HA should include not only language treatment but also emotional intervention, which would help them catch up with normal hearings as soon as possible.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2011 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2011.06.019