Mandarin tone recognition in English speakers with normal hearing and with cochlear implants

Abstract

Objective: Mandarin-speaking cochlear implant users have difficulty perceiving tonal changes in speech with current signal processing strategies. The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether English-speaking cochlear implant and normal hearing listeners can be trained to recognise closed-set Mandarin tones. The validity of using native-English speakers to evaluate Mandarin tone perception in cochlear implants was tested.Design: Two groups of native-English speaking participants were evaluated. All listeners were given training rounds and evaluation rounds in which their tonal identification was tested. The normal-hearing group was also tested with acoustic simulations of the traditional Continuous Interleaved Sampling (CIS) strategy.Study sample: Ten normal-hearing English speakers and seven cochlear implant listeners participated.Results: The normal-hearing group correctly identified unprocessed tones at 87% and CIS-processed tones at 58% on average. The cochlear implant listeners achieved 56% correct identification on average.Conclusions: This level of performance for native English speaking CI users was comparable to previous studies using native Mandarin-speaking CI listeners, which showed a mean of 59% in 19 CI users.