Importance of temporal periodicity on Mandarin tone perception of cochlear implant recipients

Abstract

Cochlear implants (CIs) were designed primarily to enhance the speech perception of western persons with bilateral sensorineural deafness. The CI technology used in the current commercial devices, in terms of both hardware and software, didn't focus on the delivery of tone or pitch related information. It's known that lexical tone is important to Mandarin-speaking people. To better encode pitch-related information, the current study will investigate the effect of temporal envelope periodicity to Mandarin tone perception of CI recipients. Temporal periodicity from each frequency band is manipulated corresponding to the fundamental frequency (F0) of the speech signal. Psychophysical experiment was carried out to evaluate the Mandarin tone perception performance of CI recipients in quiet and noisy conditions. Test materials were monosyllabic and disyllabic Chinese words with four different tones. Experimental results showed that F0-related coding on temporal periodicity can improve the Mandarin tone percepti...