The present study systematically manipulated three acoustic cues-fundamental frequency ͑f0͒, amplitude envelope, and duration-to investigate their contributions to tonal contrasts in Mandarin. Simplified stimuli with all possible combinations of these three cues were presented for identification to eight normal-hearing listeners, all native speakers of Mandarin from Taiwan. The f0 information was conveyed either by an f0-controlled sawtooth carrier or a modulated noise so as to compare the performance achievable by a clear indication of voice f0 and what is possible with purely temporal coding of f0. Tone recognition performance with explicit f0 was much better than that with any combination of other acoustic cues ͑consistently greater than 90% correct compared to 33%-65%; chance is 25%͒. In the absence of explicit f0, the temporal coding of f0 and amplitude envelope both contributed somewhat to tone recognition, while duration had only a marginal effect. Performance based on these secondary cues varied greatly across listeners. These results explain the relatively poor perception of tone in cochlear implant users, given that cochlear implants currently provide only weak cues to f0, so that users must rely upon the purely temporal ͑and secondary͒ features for the perception of tone.

Parental perspective survey demonstrated the level of auditory performance among 177 school-aged children with implant. Five factors were found to predict the auditory performance of these children, suggesting the recipient's participation in the environments, oral/aural communication mode, and without additional disabilities significantly contributing auditory performance. The parent's view of cochlear implantation provides not only an important value of children's function in real life but also as another outcome measure.

Standard Chinese has four lexical tones: high (H), low (L), rising (R) and falling (F). i There are also the so-called 'neutral-toned' syllables, often viewed as toneless, although see Chen and Xu 2004 for a dissenting view. The language has a well-studied rule that changes the first of two low tones to a higher rising tone. The rule is known as the third-tone sandhi rule. It applies whenever the two low tones are adjacent in a domain, where the domains are defined by a complex mixture of syntactic, prosodic, and focus-related factors. It is partially dependent on speech rate, so that a given utterance may have more than one way of applying the sandhi rule. In utterances with several low tones in a row, the rule may apply to some or all of them, depending on the factors just mentioned. For example, Chen (2000:386) gives two different pronunciations for this phrase: (1) /LLLH/ RLLH or RRLH [xiang [xie [xiao shuo]]] plan write novel 'to plan to write a novel'

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