title: Effects of temporal fine structure stimulation on Mandarin speech recognition in cochlear implant users.
abstract: CONCLUSIONS
  The investigated experimental coding strategies significantly improved tone identification as compared with the participants' everyday audio processor settings. However, this benefit could not be attributed entirely to temporal fine structure stimulation but seems to be caused by decreasing the lower corner frequency of the filter bank. The 6 week habituation period used in this study might have been too short to allow the listeners to derive additional lexical information from the unfamiliar stimulation patterns.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To evaluate a cochlear implant coding strategy that explicitly conveys temporal fine structure information in the context of the tonal language Mandarin.
  
  
  METHODS
  The study was designed as a longitudinal, monocentric, prospective, controlled, and randomized cross-over study and included 12 postlingually deafened adults, who were experienced cochlear implant users. Two experimental coding strategies, one of which explicitly presents temporal fine structure information, were compared to the participants' personal TEMPO+ speech processors, which do not convey fine structure information.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Both experimental coding strategies improved tone identification by approximately 11 percentage points. This improvement was significant in the female speaker test. Sentence perception, as assessed with the M-HINT test, and quality of life scores were identical with all three coding strategies.
authors.affiliation: Beijing Tong Ren Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing Institute of Otolaryngology, Key Laboratory of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery, Ministry of Education, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Beier
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Qi
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Krenmayr
authors.forename: Ning
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Ruijuan
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Dong
authors.forename: Xueqing
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Reinhold
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Schatzer
authors.forename: Clemens
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Zierhofer
authors.forename: Bo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Demin
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Han
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002681:China; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D018592:Cross-Over Studies; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011446:Prospective Studies; D013067:Speech Perception; D055815:Young Adult