Mandarin lexical tone recognition in sensorineural hearing-impaired listeners and cochlear implant users

Abstract

Conclusions: As the hearing loss becomes more severe, the tone recognition performance of hearing-impaired listeners gradually but slowly reduces. The tone recognition performance of cochlear implant listeners is below or close to the performance of severely hearing-impaired listeners. Objectives: The present study aimed to investigate the Mandarin lexical tone recognition performance of sensorineural hearing-impaired listeners and post-lingually deafened cochlear implant users. Methods: Tone recognition performance was measured for 30 normal-hearing subjects, 41sensorineural hearing-impaired listeners, and 12 cochlear implant users using 128 monosyllables recorded by a male and a female adult native Mandarin speaker. Results: The results indicated that the accuracy of tone recognition was 99.3%, 96.4%, 93.7%, 83.9%, and 81.0% for the normal-hearing, moderate, moderate to severe, severely hearing-impaired, and cochlear implant subjects, respectively. For the hearing-impaired subjects, a significantly negative correlation was observed between tone recognition performance and the audiometric hearing thresholds. For cochlear implant subjects, Tone 3 was the easiest one to perceive and Tone 2 was the hardest one to perceive. They tended to misperceive Tone 1 as Tone 2, and misperceive Tone 2 as Tones 1 and 3.

Keywords::

• Tone confusion pattern
• post-lingual deafness

Acknowledgments

We thank all the subjects for participating in this study and all staff at the Clinical Audiology Center in Beijing Tongren Hospital for helping in the recruitment of the hearing-impaired subjects. We acknowledge the support of the HEARing CRC, established and supported under the Australian Government's Cooperative Research Centers Program. This work was funded in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81070796 and 81070784), Beijing Natural Science Foundation (7122034 and 7123210), Basic-Clinical Cooperative Research Foundation of Capital Medical University (12JL46), Research Foundation of Beijing Tongren Hospital Affiliated to Capital Medical University (2012-YJJ-003), and the promotion grant for high-level scientific and technological elites in medical science from the Beijing Health Bureau (2009-3-29).

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.