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

Abstract

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.