title: Mandarin lexical tone recognition in sensorineural hearing-impaired listeners and cochlear implant users.
abstract: 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.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  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.
authors.affiliation: Beijing Tongren Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing Institute of Otolaryngology, Key Laboratory of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery (Capital Medical University), Ministry of Education, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Shuo
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Bo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Hua
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Ruijuan
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Dong
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Mannell
authors.forename: Philip
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Newall
authors.forename: Xueqing
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Beier
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Qi
authors.forename: Luo
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Demin
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Han
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001301:Audiometry, Pure-Tone; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D019929:Cochlear Implantation; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D005260:Female; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology* / Q000628:therapy; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D055815:Young Adult