Perception Of Intonation Research Articles

Cross-linguistic perception of Spanish intonation by Chinese speakers: Effects of linguistic experience and prosodic features

This study aims to explore the cross-linguistic perception of Spanish intonation patterns and the role of linguistic experience and prosodic features in identifying the question-statement contrasts. To this end, 43 Spanish native listeners and 75 Chinese learners of Spanish were presented with auditory stimuli in a gating paradigm for the recognition of sentence types. The results showed that listeners’ perception of target intonational contours was highly dependent on their language experience. Although Spanish listeners outperformed Chinese learners in perceiving different intonational cues, most Chinese learners were able to correctly identify sentence types after hearing the initial F0 peak due to the positive transfer of their tonal processing ability in their native language. In addition, our data revealed that the position of the final stressed syllable might also be a relevant factor for discriminating the sentence type depending on the length of the utterance. Overall, the findings seem to suggest a complex integration mechanism for cross-linguistic intonation perception, in which listeners’ language specificity and the prosodic structures of the materials should be accounted for evaluating non-native auditory performance.

Perception of dynamic pitch and prominence in speech

The perception of dynamic – constantly changing – pitch in speech has been extensively studied in psychoacoustics and linguistics. In psychoacoustic studies, listeners are usually presented with short stimuli such as vowels or syllables, and their ability to discriminate a pair of stimuli is assessed. On the other hand, linguistic studies concern intonation over an utterance. Intonation entails not only acoustic prominence realised by pitch, duration, and loudness, but also listeners’ knowledge about the relative prominence between syllables or between words in their language. This paper discusses a series of speech perception experiments using both psychoacoustic and linguistic tasks. Participants judged either relative pitch height or prominence between two pitch peaks or valleys in an utterance. Native English speakers in different age and dialectal groups were tested. The results showed that, first, listeners’ pitch height discrimination in the utterance context seems to be more accurate than previously reported. Second, there is a robust perceptual asymmetry between pitch peaks and valleys, the valleys posing significant challenges in perception. Third, listeners’ perception of pitch height and prominence is disassociated. The findings taken together suggest an intricate interaction between the physical properties of the stimuli and listeners’ top-down knowledge in the perception of speech intonation.

РОЛЬ ВЕСТИБУЛЯРНОГО СЛУХА В ВОСПРИЯТИИ РЕЧИ (ОБЗОР ЗАРУБЕЖНЫХ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ)

The article presents a review of foreign studies on the participation of the vestibular system in speech perception. Although for a long time it was believed that the vestibular system is involved only in the management of balance and motor skills, there is increasing evidence that it is involved in cognitive processes such as memory, attention, and speech. There is no doubt that auditory perception is necessary for speech perception. The peripheral parts of the vestibular and auditory analyzers are anatomically closely related. But there is not enough research on how vestibular organs affect auditory perception. Evolutionarily, the vestibular apparatus appeared in animals much earlier than the peripheral hearing organs. The human vestibular apparatus consists of five paired sections: three semicircular canals and two otolith organs – the utriculus and sacculus. In the process of evolution, the semicircular canals of humans and other mammals underwent maximum changes. The ability to register auditory information was preserved only in one of the parts of the vestibular apparatus – sacculus. Vestibular (saccular) hearing allows us to register low-frequency sounds in the range from 100 to 1000 Hz. This helps speech perception, as this frequency range is associated with the perception of intonation and other prosodic components of the utterance. Saccular hearing also helps speech perception in noise. Data on the role of the vestibular apparatus in speech perception are useful for all speech and language specialists. The ability of the sacculus to respond to sound is used for instrumental diagnostics of the vestibular system – cervical vestibular myogenic evoked potentials (cVEMP).

Using intonation to disambiguate meaning: The role of empathy and proficiency in L2 perceptual development

AbstractThe present study investigates the interplay between proficiency and empathy in the development of second language (L2) prosody by analyzing the perception and processing of intonation in questions and statements in L2 Spanish. A total of 225 adult L2 Spanish learners (L1 English) from the Northeastern United States completed a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task in which they listened to four utterance types and categorized them as either questions or statements. We used Bayesian multilevel regression and drift diffusion modeling to analyze the 2AFC data as a function of proficiency level and empathy scores for each utterance type. We show that learner response accuracy and sensitivity to intonation are positively correlated with proficiency, and this association is affected by individual empathy levels in both response accuracy and sentence processing. Higher empathic individuals, in comparison with lower empathic individuals, appear to be more sensitive to intonation cues in the process of forming sound-meaning associations, though increased sensitivity does not necessarily imply increased processing speed. The results motivate the inclusion of measures of pragmatic skill, such as empathy, to better account for intonational meaning processing and sentence comprehension in second language acquisition.

Intonation as a means of conveying an utterance in Komi prose

Introduction. The purpose of this paper is to study intonation features and means of conveying speech acts in Komi works of art. The voice as a source of information was not in the focus of the attention of Komi linguists, the issues of Komi intonation and the means of their reflection have not been studied. In this regard, the address to the general characteristics of how Komi prose writers reflect the intonation features of their characters’ speech is considered relevant in the Komi language and allows us to speak about a new method of studying the perception of phrasal intonation. Materials and Methods. The material for the study based on the examples from the works of modern fiction of Komi classics. The methodological basis of the study was a set of such linguistic methods as descriptive, perceptual analysis of phrasal intonation, linguistic analysis of the text, elements of structural and semantic analysis. Results and Discussion. The study of intonation allowed us to state a number of prosodic signs. The described speech of the characters of literary works was studied according to various parameters of acoustics: duration, intensity, pitch, timbre, tempo, rhythm; by means of non-speech sounds, through an indication of the features of articulation, diction; by similarity with the phenomena of the sounding world. It was found that the author’s remarks of works of art describe the speech volume of the characters in particular detail, the intensity of the sounding speech. Conclusions. The research material has shown that the language functions of intonation can be fully and consistently reflected not only in live sounding speech, but also in writing in the form of the speech of the literary hero of prose works. The functions and expressive possibilities of intonation are contained in the author’s designations of prosodic characteristics of speech. An important role is played by the individual style of the author, which is distinguished by sensitivity to the sound side of the speech of thier characters.

The form and function processing of lexical tone and intonation in tone-language-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder.

Studies on how the form versus function aspect of tone and intonation is processed by autistic individuals have mainly focused on speakers of non-tonal languages (e.g., English) with equivocal results. While the samples' heterogeneous cognitive abilities may be contributing factors, the phenotype of tone and intonation processing in autism may also vary with one's language background. Thirty-eight cognitively able autistic and 32 non-autistic Mandarin-speaking children completed tone and intonation perception tasks, each containing a function and form condition. Results suggested that the abilities to discriminate tone and intonation were not impaired at either the form or function level in these autistic children, and that these abilities were positively associated with one another in both autistic and non-autistic groups. The more severe the autism symptoms, the worse the form- and function-level of tone and intonation processing. While enhanced tone and intonation processing has been found in a subgroup of autistic children, it may not be a general characteristic of the autistic population with long-term tone language experience. These findings reveal typical tone and intonation processing at both the form and function levels in cognitively able Mandarin-speaking autistic children and provide evidence for associated tone and intonation processing abilities across levels.

The effect of lexical tone experience on English intonation perception in Mandarin-speaking cochlear-implanted children.

To examine the effect of lexical tone experience on English intonation perception in Mandarin-speaking cochlear-implanted children during second language acquisition in Taiwan. A retrospective cohort study. A tertiary referred center. Fourteen children with cochlear implant (CI) in the experimental group, and 9 normal hearing children in the control group were enrolled in this study. Cochlear implantation and hearing rehabilitation. Two speech recognition accuracies were examined: (1) Lexical tone recognition (4-alternative forced choice, AFC), (2) English Sentence Intonation (2AFC). The overall accuracies for tone perception are 61.13% (standard deviation, SD = 10.84%) for CI group and 93.82% (SD = 1.80%) for normal hearing group. Tone 4 and Tone 1 were more easily to be recognized than tone 2 and tone 3 in the pediatric CI recipients (cCI) group. In English intonation perception, the overall accuracies are 61.82% (SD = 16.85%) for CI group, and 97.59% (SD = 4.73%) for normal hearing group. Significant high correlation (R = .919, P ≦ .000) between lexical tone perception and English intonation perception is noted. There is no significant difference for English intonation perception accuracies between Mandarin-speaking cCI (61.82%) and English-speaking cCI (70.13%, P = .11). Mandarin-speaking cochlear-implanted children showed significant deficits in perception of lexical tone and English intonation relative to normal hearing children. There was no tonal language benefit in Mandarin-speaking cochlear-implanted children's English intonation perception, compared to the English-speaking cochlear-implanted peers. For cochlear-implanted children, better lexical tone perception comes with better English intonation perception. Enhancing Mandarin prosodic perception for cochlear-implanted children may benefit their command of intonation in English.

Perception of Intonation on Neutral Tone in Mandarin

In Mandarin, lexical tone has been found to interact with intonational tone to influence intonation perception, with the falling T4 facilitating the perception of the statement/question contrast the most, and the rising T2 the least. However, in addition to the four citation tones T1-T4, Mandarin has “neutral tone” which marks weak, non-initial syllables that do not carry a citation tone. The prevailing view is that neutral tone is, in fact, phonologically toneless. It is unknown whether neutral tone can also affect intonation perception. However, it is reasonable to hypothesize that if neutral tone is indeed toneless, it cannot interact with intonational tone in the same way as citation tones do. We investigated this novel hypothesis with a perception experiment in which 22 Mandarin speakers had to determine whether disyllabic citation tone and neutral tone words were a question or statement. Results show that the identification of intonation contours is more accurate for neutral tone than for T2, and similarly accurate for neutral tone and T4, regardless of whether the neutral tone is intrinsic or derived. Furthermore, both T4 and neutral tone are realized with a reduced pitch range at a higher pitch level in questions, unlike T2, which is characterized by a slightly expanded pitch range and a higher pitch level. It is possible that intonation perception in Mandarin is facilitated by changes in the phonetic shapes of lexical tones brought by intonation rather than the phonological interaction between lexical tones and intonation. The importance of pitch changes to the intonation perception in Mandarin was further tested in a second perception experiment with the same 22 participants and disyllabic stimuli with manipulated pitch level and range. Results indicate that the use of pitch cues in intonation perception shows tone-specific differences, namely, pitch range is more important in signaling the question/statement contrast in utterances ending with T4 or neutral tone, while pitch level is the only perceptual cue to interrogativity for utterances ending in T2.

The Perception of Lexical Tone and Intonation in Whispered Speech by Mandarin-Speaking Congenital Amusics.

A fundamental feature of human speech is variation, including the manner of phonation, as exemplified in the case of whispered speech. In this study, we employed whispered speech to examine an unresolved issue about congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder of musical pitch processing, which also affects speech pitch processing such as lexical tone and intonation perception. The controversy concerns whether amusia is a pitch-processing disorder or can affect speech processing beyond pitch. We examined lexical tone and intonation recognition in 19 Mandarin-speaking amusics and 19 matched controls in phonated and whispered speech, where fundamental frequency (f o) information is either present or absent. The results revealed that the performance of congenital amusics was inferior to that of controls in lexical tone identification in both phonated and whispered speech. These impairments were also detected in identifying intonation (statements/questions) in phonated and whispered modes. Across the experiments, regression models revealed that f o and non-f o (duration, intensity, and formant frequency) acoustic cues predicted tone and intonation recognition in phonated speech, whereas non-f o cues predicted tone and intonation recognition in whispered speech. There were significant differences between amusics and controls in the use of both f o and non-f o cues. The results provided the first evidence that the impairments of amusics in lexical tone and intonation identification prevail into whispered speech and support the hypothesis that the deficits of amusia extend beyond pitch processing. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.19302275.

Musicality and Age Interaction in Tone Development.

Vocal pitch, which involves not only F0 but also multiple covarying acoustic cues is central to linguistic perception and production at various levels of prosodic structure. Recent studies on language development have shown that differences in learners' musicality affect the F0 cue development in perception of sentence-level intonation or in prosodic realization of focus. This study aims to contribute toward a fuller understanding of the effect of musicality on linguistic pitch development via a close investigation of the relationship between musicality, age, and lexical tone production covering both F0 and spectral cues in children. Forty-three native Mandarin-speaking children between the ages of 4 and 6 years are recruited to participate in both a semi-spontaneous tone production task and a musicality test. For each age (4, 5, and 6 years) and musicality (below or above the median score of each age group) group, the contrastivity of the four tones is evaluated by performing automatic tone classification using three sets of acoustic cues (F0, spectral cues, and both). It has been found that higher musicality is associated with higher contrastivity of the tones produced at the age of 4 and 5 years, but not at the age of 6 years. These results suggest that musicality promotes earlier development of tone production only in earlier stages of prosodic development; by the age of 6 years, the musicality advantage in tone production subsides.

Effects of dynamic pitch manipulation methods on speech perception in noise by older listeners with hearing loss

Dynamic pitch, as defined by the variation in fundamental frequency (f0) of speech, is a major acoustic cue in speech perception. While dynamic pitch manipulation negatively affects speech perception in noise on a group level, there is substantial variability across older listeners with hearing loss. The manipulation method used in previous studies, however, may distort pitch contours in natural speech. In this study, a new manipulation method is employed by exaggerating pitch contours above mean pitch. The primary purpose of the study is to compare the effects of these two manipulation methods on speech recognition in noise by older listeners with hearing loss. The secondary purpose is to examine the connection between individuals’ responses to dynamic pitch manipulation and intonation perception. Speech reception threshold in noise was measured from 8 older listeners (mean age 74.5 years) with mild-moderate sensorineural hearing loss. Intonation perception was measured by a 2-alternative discrimination paradigm. Data up to date suggest a stronger effect from the new method, with the weakened dynamic pitch being more beneficial than the original pitch contour. Further, individuals’ intonation perception is associated with their response to pitch manipulation. The theoretical and clinical implications will be discussed. [Word supported by NIH.]

Neural Bases of Intonation and Tone Perception in Mandarin Chinese

Neural Bases of Intonation and Tone Perception in Mandarin Chinese

Perception and Production of Statement-Question Intonation in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Developmental Investigation

Prosody or “melody in speech” in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often perceived as atypical. This study examined perception and production of statements and questions in 84 children, adolescents and adults with and without ASD, as well as participants’ pitch direction discrimination thresholds. The results suggested that the abilities to discriminate (in both speech and music conditions), identify, and imitate statement-question intonation were intact in individuals with ASD across age cohorts. Sensitivity to pitch direction predicted performance on intonation processing in both groups, who also exhibited similar developmental changes. These findings provide evidence for shared mechanisms in pitch processing between speech and music, as well as associations between low- and high-level pitch processing and between perception and production of pitch.

Ethnoaesthetics of the Ukrainian folk song tradition in the performance of the singer Oksana Mukha

The topicality is associated with the need for musicological understanding of the value categories of ethnoaesthetics in the creative activity of singers that represent the Ukrainian folk song tradition in modern variety vocal art.
 The purpose of the article is to identify ethno-aesthetic value components in the performance of O. Mukha as a personification of the uniqueness of the Ukrainian national expression.
 The methodology consists of scientific works of prominent Ukrainian scientists devoted to the study of ethno-aesthetic ideas and criteria in the traditional songs of Ukraine (Y. Harasym, T. Orlova, V. Lychkova), as well as genre-style and performance specifics of Ukrainian musical folklore (K. Kvitka, F. Kolessa, A. Ivanytskyi, S. Hryts).
 The results. The artistic imagery of the iconic folk songs of O. Mukha repertoire, which is a part of the ethno-aesthetic fund of the Ukrainian folk song tradition, is considered. The general features of ethnoaesthetics of the folk song performing tradition of Ukraine, including its vocal and technical component are outlined.
 The novelty. The article considers the performance of O. Mukha for the first time and reveals ethnoaesthetic value components in it.
 The practical significance. The study of the essence of folk singing as an art with its own artistic and value component, based on an established system of qualitative components of ethnoaesthetics, as well as the study of performing experience of prominent Ukrainian folk singers are the necessary practical material for creating a scientific basis and general methodology of folk vocal art.
 The conclusions. Musical ethnoaesthetics as a component of traditional culture covers the semantic field of songs, concentrating on the structure, rhythmics and size of a poem, the richness of national melos, its intonation and tonality basis. Ethnoaesthetics of the folk song tradition of Ukraine is manifested in the uniqueness of the national expression, namely: vocal-timbre color of sound, in the peculiarities of intonation, freedom of metro-rhythmic movement, variability and melismatic richness.
 In O. Mukha’s works, the creation of the sound matter of the modern performance version of a folk song is based on the perception of song intonation as sound emotion and understanding of the boundless ocean of ancient symbols of the national musical language, which during centuries has crystallized in the folk song tradition. Her works grow out from the reflection on the national song culture and traditions of her family. Work on each ancient relict of tradition is based on discovering the potential of the power of its aesthetic, spiritual and emotional impact on listeners, perception of the stock of expressive possibilities.

The specificity of cerebral lateralization in perception of emotional intonation of speech among children with special abilities

Much attention has been recently given to examination of developmental peculiarities of cognitive processes of children and adolescents with special abilities. The goal lies in comparative study of the ontogenetic peculiarities of cerebral mechanisms underlying the processing of emotional information in children who are engaged in extracurricular musical and mathematical activities. The sampling included the children engaged in additional activities and the control group, and consisted of the three age groups: 7-10 year, 10-13 years, and 14-17 years. In the conducted experimental studies, the respondents had to identify the emotional intonation of speech in the given phrase. The study revealed the significant ontogenetic differences in perception of emotional prosody of speech between the control group and the children engaged in additional activities. In the group of children of 7-13 years, who are engaged in additional classes, the predominant activity of left hemisphere testifies to the specificity of inter-hemispheric connections in the perception of emotional information. The dependence of the effects of cerebral lateralization on age was analogous in the groups of children engaged in mathematical and musical activities; and differed from the results of the control group, which allows claiming that the interinfluence of mathematical and musical skills is to a certain extent explained by the peculiarities of developmental age of cerebral lateralization in childhood and adolescence.

The Effect of High-Variability Phonetic Training and Low-Variability Phonetic Training on Chinese Primary Learners’ Perception of Intonation: Focusing on Grammatical Function and Emotional/Attitudinal Function of Intonation

The Effect of High-Variability Phonetic Training and Low-Variability Phonetic Training on Chinese Primary Learners’ Perception of Intonation: Focusing on Grammatical Function and Emotional/Attitudinal Function of Intonation

Emphasis teaching based on texts in mechanical engineering

The article describes features of the Russian emphatic models related to scientific style of speech and it is proved that they are able to develop several topics in the microtext, empower a phrase and convey its pragmatic content, form a certain emotional mood, set a communicative attitude to comprehend the utterance in a new perspective, focus recipient's attention on the emphatic segment, important in a particular situation for the perception of this or that information. The analysis allows us to conclude that emphatic models in the scientific style are communicatively dissected sentences, due to text links and having an existential meaning that creates an evaluative nomination. This emphase property makes it necessary to study it in a foreign audience in classes on the scientific style of speech and to master the skills of its use by foreign students. The correct perception of intonation or accentuation of a phrase segment (emphase) determines the level of development of foreign students’ monological speech skills which are necessary due to their communicative needs not only in the socio-cultural, but also in the educational and professional spheres. Complex syntagme scientific phrases cause a particular difficulty in perception: their understanding depends on accentuation of separate syntaxemes.

Musicians' Earplugs: Do They Affect Performance or Listeners' Perceptions?

Does wearing musicians' earplugs while performing affect the quality of the performance? Can listeners perceive a difference in sound when musicians are performing with or without earplugs? The risk of hearing loss is a concern for musicians, but some are reluctant to wear hearing protection due to factors such as an inability to hear their own instrument properly and the possibility of decreased sound quality for listeners. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of musicians' earplugs on instrumental pitch accuracy and the perception of tone quality, intonation, and dynamic contrast, as perceived by musicians and listeners. Ten university studio faculty teachers were recorded performing single pitches and lyrical and technical passages, first without earplugs and then immediately after with earplugs. A sample of 8 studio faculty teachers and 88 undergraduate music education students completed a researcher-created music perception test of tone quality, intonation, and dynamic contrast. Objective analyses of the single pitch recordings made by faculty with and without earplugs indicate that pitch accuracy did not favor either condition consistently. Results from the perception test indicate that although both faculty and student listeners perceived some differences, the most frequent perception was that the audio pair was equal, and there was no clear difference between performing with and without earplugs in terms of tone quality, intonation, or dynamic contrast. These findings suggest that musicians should feel confident that wearing musicians' earplugs while performing does not adversely affect pitch accuracy or listeners' perceptions of their timbre and dynamic control.

«РОЗАНОВСКИЙ СЛОЙ» В ТВОРЧЕСТВЕ АННЫ АХМАТОВОЙ

The article establishes that Anna Akhmatova was well acquainted with texts by the philosopher Vasily Rozanov ( Solitaria , Fallen Leaves , his literary criticism) and the circumstances of his life, knew his daughter N. V. Vereshchagina-Rozanova. This conclusion is based on the vast material of texts by Akhmatova (poetry, prose, notebooks), as well as on Lydia Chukovskaya’s memoirs about her. Texts by Akhmatova are shown to contain ‘Rozanov’s layer’ (implications, references to Rozanov’s works), which reflects the poet’s direct and implicit dialogue with the iconic figure of Russian modernism – both religious-philosophical (‘new religious consciousness’) and literary (the genre of ‘fallen leaves’). In the literary sense, what was of great significance for Akhmatova, as well as for O. Mandelstam, is Rozanov’s ‘non-literary’, ‘pre-Gutenberg’ attitude to the word (intonation and intertextuality). Rozanov’s discourse ( Among Artists , 1909) is dialogically refracted in Akhmatova’s poem Venice (1912). Rozanov’s perception of biblical poetics is reflected in the biblical cycle of Akhmatova ( Rachel , 1921; Lot’s Wife , 1924; Michal , 1959–1961). The paper provides a detailed analysis of the image of Rozanov as a participant in the ‘masquerade’ of the early 20 th century epoch as presented by Akhmatova in the diary entry concerning Poem without a Hero (1962), in which the poet mythologizes Rozanov as a gender philosopher (metaphysics of gender) in the demonic context of Grigori Rasputin. The paper analyzes the multilayer allusion in Poem without a Hero (1940–1965), where one can discern Akhmatova’s dialogue with Rozanov about ‘spirit’ and ‘flesh’ in the context of Blok. It comes to light that Rozanov and Akhmatova concur in the demonic and mortal perception of Alexander Blok and in the modernist perception of Mikhail Lermontov as the ‘progenitor’ of Russian literature (as well as they concur in the intonation perception of Lermontov’s poetry). The modernist form of the ‘stream of consciousness’ (‘fallen leaves’), discovered by Rozanov, was of great importance for Akhmatova’s memoir prose, directly and indirectly (through Mandelstam and Pasternak).

Evaluation of the Optimized Pitch and Language Strategy in Cochlear Implant Recipients.

The Optimized Pitch and Language (OPAL) strategy enhances pitch perception through coding of fundamental frequency (F0) amplitude modulation information in the stimulus envelope delivered to a cochlear implant. Previous research using a prototype of the strategy demonstrated significant benefits in musical pitch and lexical tone discrimination tasks with no degradation in speech recognition when compared with the clinical Advanced Combination Encoder (ACE) strategy in a small group of subjects. Based on those studies, a modified version of the strategy was implemented in the commercial Nucleus CP900 series processor. The aims of the present study were to establish whether the CP900 OPAL implementation continued to provide improved F0 pitch perception in a speech intonation task with no degradation to speech perception in quiet and noise, when compared with the clinical ACE strategy in a larger cohort of subjects. Further aims were to evaluate fitting procedures and subject acclimatization to the strategy after take-home experience. Twenty experienced adult cochlear implant recipients were enrolled in the study. Two subjects withdrew during the study leaving 18 sets of data for analysis. A repeated-measures single-subject design with take-home experience was used to test for improved speech intonation perception using OPAL compared with ACE and for comparable performance between strategies for open-set word recognition in quiet at two presentation levels, sentence recognition in adaptive 4-talker babble noise, and speech intelligibility ratings. The stimulation rate employed for OPAL was 1200 pulses per second/channel which was higher than the default clinical rate of 900 pulses per second/channel used for ACE by all subjects in the present study. Two variations of the OPAL "F0 restore gain" (the gain applied to restore the loudness of modulated channels) were investigated: "custom" measured per subject and "default" which was the average of all subject custom gains. A significant group mean benefit on the intonation test of 8.5% points was shown for OPAL compared with ACE. There was a significant period of adaptation to OPAL with significantly poorer sentence in noise scores acutely and after only 2 weeks of take-home experience. After 4 weeks of take-home experience, comparable word perception in quiet and sentence perception in noise for OPAL were obtained. Furthermore, there was good subject acceptability in the field with comparable speech intelligibility ratings between strategies. Results of the fitting procedure showed that OPAL did not require any additional steps compared with fitting of ACE. A default F0 restore gain provided comparable outcomes to a custom gain setting. The CP900 OPAL implementation provided a significant benefit to perception of speech intonation when compared with ACE. Comparable speech perception (in quiet and noise) and subjective ratings of speech intelligibility between strategies were also achieved after a period of acclimatization. These outcomes are consistent with results of earlier studies using prototype versions of the strategy and reaffirm its potential for improvement of F0 pitch perception in speech while preserving coding of segmental speech information. Furthermore, the OPAL strategy can be programmed into subject's processors using the same fitting procedures used for ACE thereby simplifying its adoption in clinical settings.