Abstract
Sensitivity to complex pitch is notoriously poor in adults with cochlear implants (CIs), but it is unclear whether this is true for children with CIs. Many are implanted today at a very young age, and factors related to brain plasticity (age at implantation, duration of CI experience, and speaking a tonal language) might have strong influences on pitch sensitivity. School-aged children participated, speaking English or Mandarin, having normal hearing (NH) or wearing a CI, using their clinically assigned settings with envelope-based coding strategies. Percent correct was measured in three-interval three-alternative forced choice tasks, for the discrimination of fundamental frequency (F0) of broadband harmonic complexes, and for the discrimination of sinusoidal amplitude modulation rate (AMR) of broadband noise, with reference frequencies at 100 and 200 Hz to focus on voice pitch processing. Data were fitted using a maximum-likelihood technique. CI children displayed higher thresholds and shallower slopes than NH children in F0 discrimination, regardless of linguistic background. Thresholds and slopes were more similar between NH and CI children in AMR discrimination. Once the effect of chronological age was extracted from the variance, the aforementioned factors related to brain plasticity did not contribute significantly to the CI children's sensitivity to pitch. Unless different strategies attempt to encode fine structure information, potential benefits of plasticity may be missed.
Highlights
A fine sensitivity to pitch is desirable for music perception (McDermott and Oxenham, 2008) and for many aspects of speech perception, including the perception of prosody, speaker identity, voice emotion, and the separation of target speech from a noisy background in auditory scene analysis
In normal hearing (NH), the narrow auditory filters in the low frequency/apical region of the cochlea resolve the broadband harmonic complex into its constituent spectral peaks; the place-specific periodicity cues contribute to salient pitch sensation and fine pitch discrimination (Meddis and O’Mard, 1997; Bernstein and Oxenham, 2005)
GENERAL DISCUSSION The present study showed consistent evidence that pitch sensitivity is largely impaired in Cochlear implants (CIs) children compared to their NH peers
Summary
A fine sensitivity to pitch is desirable for music perception (McDermott and Oxenham, 2008) and for many aspects of speech perception, including the perception of prosody, speaker identity, voice emotion, and the separation of target speech from a noisy background in auditory scene analysis (respectively, Lehiste, 1970; Bregman, 1990; Murray and Arnott, 1993; Cutler et al, 1997; Bird and Darwin, 1998; Hillenbrand and Clark, 2009). The listener must analyze pitch changes at both the syllabic and sentence levels to decode the semantic meaning (lexical tones) and the communicative intent or mood of the speaker. This places even greater informational emphasis on voice-pitch processing (Chao, 1968; Howie, 1976; Liu and Pell, 2012). In normal hearing (NH), the narrow auditory filters in the low frequency/apical region of the cochlea resolve the broadband harmonic complex into its constituent spectral peaks; the place-specific periodicity cues contribute to salient pitch sensation and fine pitch discrimination (Meddis and O’Mard, 1997; Bernstein and Oxenham, 2005). Pitch changes acquire added importance, as, across cultures, the exaggerated prosody of infant-directed speech is thought to play a key role in language acquisition (Fernald et al, 1989; Bornstein et al, 1992; Jusczyk et al, 1992; Jusczyk, 1999; Soderstrom et al, 2003; Thiessen et al, 2005)
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