Tone perception of Cantonese-speaking prelingually hearing-impaired children with cochlear implants

Objective To evaluate tone perception performance in Cantonese-speaking prelingually hearing-impaired children with cochlear implants. Study design and setting The ability to discriminate and identify Cantonese tones was evaluated on 17 native Cantonese-speaking prelingually hearing-impaired children. Performance was correlated to factors like age of implantation and general communication ability. Results Subjects' performance in discrimination and identification tasks was slightly above chance level. Although variations in the contour fundamental frequency of the tones provided some cues for tone discrimination, these distinctions proved insufficient for subjects to perform well. Tone 6 (low level tone) was the most difficult to identify. Subjects' performance did not correlate with gender, age of implantation, duration of implant use, frequency of auditory training session, or general communication ability. Conclusion Although some children were able to discriminate and/or identify Cantonese tones, their performance was poor. Further studies are needed to understand how tone perception relate to daily speech understanding. Significance Cochlear implant speech coding strategies may need modification to optimize tone perception.postprin

Prediction of hearing thresholds: Comparison of cortical evoked response audiometry and auditory steady state response audiometry techniques

The present study evaluated how well auditory steady state response (ASSR) and tone burst cortical evoked response audiometry (CERA) thresholds predict behavioral thresholds in the same participants. A total of 63 ears were evaluated. For ASSR testing, 100% amplitude modulated and 10% frequency modulated tone stimuli at a modulation frequency of 40Hz were used. Behavioral thresholds were closer to CERA thresholds than ASSR thresholds. ASSR and CERA thresholds were closer to behavioral thresholds at higher frequencies than at lower frequencies. Although predictions based on CERA thresholds are slightly more accurate than ASSR thresholds, the differences may not be clinically significant, particularly when the degree of individual variations is considered. Prediction of hearing thresholds became more accurate when hearing loss increased. Due to variations in prediction across participants, a single correction factor cannot be used. Other factors must be considered in selecting whether to use CERA or ASSR in predicting behavioral thresholds. © 2007 British Society of Audiology, International Society of Audiology, and Nordic Audiological Society.postprin

Assessing the perceptual contributions of vowels and consonants to Mandarin sentence intelligibility

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Development of a Mandarin Expressive and Receptive Vocabulary Test for Children Using cochlear implants

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Speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants: A systematic review

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Contributions of the high-RMS-level segments to the intelligibility of mandarin sentences

Recent evidence suggests that segments carrying more spectral changes [e.g., consonant-vowel boundaries in the middle root-mean-square (RMS) level segments] are important to predict the intelligibility of English sentences. Nevertheless, considering the difference between Mandarin and English languages, it is hypothesized that the high-RMS-level segments might provide more perceptual information to the intelligibility of Mandarin speech. Two studies were conducted in this paper to assess the relative contributions of the high-RMS-level segments to the intelligibility of Mandarin sentences, i.e., speech perception and intelligibility prediction. Results show that 1) Mandarin sentences containing the high-RMS-level (i.e., above the overall RMS level of the whole utterance) segments are more intelligible (i.e., recognition rate up to 91%) than those with the middle-RMS-level segments; and 2) the high-RMS-level segments, which carry more vowel and tonal information, contribute more in predicting the intelligibility of Mandarin sentences in noise.published_or_final_versio

Development of a Mandarin expressive and receptive vocabulary test for children using cochlear implants

Free papers 8 - Cochlear Implantation 2INTRODUCTION: Cochlear implants provide children with profound hearing loss access to sounds and improve their speech perception, speech production and language skills. Outcomes on language development are useful for counseling and in planning habilitation programs. However, such research in Mainland China ...published_or_final_versio

Effect of temporal fine structure on speech intelligibility modeling

Temporal fine structure (TFS) carries important information for the speech perception of hearing-impaired listeners and for the design of novel prosthetic hearing devices. This study assessed the performance of present intelligibility indices for predicting the intelligibility of speech containing different amount of TFS information. Speech intelligibility data was collected from vocoded and wideband Mandarin sentences containing little/partial and intact TFS information, respectively, and was then subjected to the correlation analysis with existing intelligibility indices. It was found that, though performing well in predicting the intelligibility of vocoded or wideband speech separately, present intelligibility indices were not highly correlated with the intelligibility scores when a general function was used to map all intelligibility measures to intelligibility scores. Analysis further showed that the intelligibility prediction power could be significantly improved when multiple condition-dependent functions were used for mapping intelligibility measures to intelligibility scores. © 2013 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Are hearing and middle ear statuses at risk in Chinese patients undergoing orthognathic surgery?

Orthognathic surgery, which is performed to correct dentofacial abnormalities, has been associated with postoperative reduction in hearing sensitivity and middle ear dysfunction. In this study, the pre- and postoperative hearing status and middle ear function of 37 Chinese subjects who underwent orthognathic surgery, as well as subjective reports of aural symptoms, particularly hearing loss, tinnitus, fullness and otalgia, were investigated. There was a significant increase in the number of subjects with measured loss, perceived loss and aural fullness from pre-surgery to 1 week post surgery. However, the percentage of increase was small compared with previous findings. This difference in findings was attributed to the type of surgical techniques used, and to the fact that the Chinese population appears to be less susceptible to middle ear effusion. Subjective complaints of aural symptoms may not be accompanied by measured loss.postprin

Characterization of speech understanding in various types of noise

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