Abstract
The effect of low-frequency acoustic input on the categorical perception of lexical tones was investigated with simulated electric-acoustic hearing. A synthesized T1-T2 (flat-rising) tone continuum of Mandarin monosyllables /i/ was used, and they were manipulated as five conditions: unprocessed, low-frequency acoustic-only, electric-only, electric-acoustic stimulation, and bimodal stimulation. Results showed the performance under electric-only condition was the significantly lowest, and the difference of other pairwise comparisons between conditions was quite small. These findings suggest that the low-frequency acoustic input can shape the categorical perception, and the combinations of acoustic and electric hearing within or across ears have no significant effect.
Highlights
Cochlear implant (CI) is the only treatment for patients with profound-to-severe hearing loss
This benefit could be attributed to the robust representation of fundamental frequency (F0) information and the harmonics provided by low-frequency acoustic hearing
The result showed that the discrimination score of between-category discrimination was significantly higher than that of within-discrimination for all test conditions except for CI [t(14) 1⁄4 –0.062, p 1⁄4 0.951], indicating there was no categorical perception of lexical tones for CI condition
Summary
Cochlear implant (CI) is the only treatment for patients with profound-to-severe hearing loss. Recent studies have shown that the low-frequency acoustic information could benefit the CI users’ speech and music perception (Qin and Oxenham, 2006; Brown and Bacon, 2010; Yang and Zeng, 2017). This benefit could be attributed to the robust representation of fundamental frequency (F0) information and the harmonics provided by low-frequency acoustic hearing. F0 cue in the low-frequency acoustic signal may help listeners to track the target voice, and segregate speech from background sounds (Li and Loizou, 2008; Brown and Bacon, 2009) via “glimpsing” processing
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