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

To evaluate tone perception performance in Cantonese-speaking prelingually hearing-impaired children with cochlear implants. 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. 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. 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. Cochlear implant speech coding strategies may need modification to optimize tone perception.