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

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Summary

Introduction

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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