title: Pitch and lexical tone perception of bilingual English-Mandarin-speaking cochlear implant recipients, hearing aid users, and normally hearing listeners.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The purpose of this current study was to investigate whether pitch, lexical tone, and/or speech-in-noise perception were significantly correlated for Singaporean teenagers or adults who spoke both Mandarin and English.
  
  
  METHODS
  Thirty-three normal hearing or near-normal hearing listeners who did not use a hearing device (NNH group), eight postlingually deafened cochlear implant (CI) recipients (CI group), and three postlingually deafened bilateral hearing aid (HA) users (HA group) were recruited. All participants were bilingual Mandarin-English-speaking Singaporean residents. Participants were assessed on tests of pitch-ranking, lexical tone perception, and speech-in-noise.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The NNH group scored significantly better than the CI group for all tests and subtests. There were no significant differences for the pitch test between the HA group and either the CI or NNH group. However, HA users scored significantly better than the CI group, and more aligned with the NNH group's scores for both the lexical tone and Mandarin speech-in-noise test. There were highly significant moderate positive correlations between all three tests. Discussion Overall, the performance of the CI users in this study indicates that CI recipients still struggle on pitch-related auditory perception tasks. Additionally, although the test scores from the HA users were better than the CI recipients, they were not as good as the NNH listeners. The significant moderate correlations between all three tests indicate that there is at least some degree of overlap in the skills required to accurately perceive these stimuli.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The overall results suggest that CI users, and to a lesser extent HA users, still struggle with complex auditory perceptual tasks, particularly when it requires the perception of pitch. However, it may be possible that training one of these skills (e.g. musical pitch) may then generalize to other tasks (e.g. lexical tone and/or speech-in-noise). This is important for counseling, as well as for planning effective rehabilitation programs.
authors.forename: Valerie
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Looi
authors.forename: Elizabeth-Raye
authors.initials: ER
authors.lastname: Teo
authors.forename: Jenny
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Loo
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D012048:Correction of Hearing Impairment / Q000295:instrumentation*; D005260:Female; D006310:Hearing Aids; D034381:Hearing Loss / Q000523:psychology / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D019303:Multilingualism; D009146:Music / Q000523:psychology; D009622:Noise; D010898:Pitch Perception; D012846:Singapore; D013067:Speech Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Cochlear implants; Hearing aid; Lexical tone; Music; Pitch; Tonal language