Mandarin lexical tone recognition in sensorineural hearing-impaired listeners and cochlear implant users

Conclusions: As the hearing loss becomes more severe, the tone recognition performance of hearing-impaired listeners gradually but slowly reduces. The tone recognition performance of cochlear implant listeners is below or close to the performance of severely hearing-impaired listeners. Objectives: The present study aimed to investigate the Mandarin lexical tone recognition performance of sensorineural hearing-impaired listeners and post-lingually deafened cochlear implant users. Methods: Tone recognition performance was measured for 30 normal-hearing subjects, 41sensorineural hearing-impaired listeners, and 12 cochlear implant users using 128 monosyllables recorded by a male and a female adult native Mandarin speaker. Results: The results indicated that the accuracy of tone recognition was 99.3%, 96.4%, 93.7%, 83.9%, and 81.0% for the normal-hearing, moderate, moderate to severe, severely hearing-impaired, and cochlear implant subjects, respectively. For the hearing-impaired subjects, a significantly negative correlation was observed between tone recognition performance and the audiometric hearing thresholds. For cochlear implant subjects, Tone 3 was the easiest one to perceive and Tone 2 was the hardest one to perceive. They tended to misperceive Tone 1 as Tone 2, and misperceive Tone 2 as Tones 1 and 3.