“…Normal hearing (NH) listeners of tonal languages can use pitch cues to distinguish lexical tones robustly even when acoustic signals are degraded by environmental noise, low-fidelity playback, human speech production variability, etc. In contrast, for most cochlear implant (CI) recipients, lexical tone perception is still challenging (Lu et al, 2022 ), and performance varies significantly across recipients and in environments (Chang et al, 2016 ; Liu et al, 2017 ; Mao and Xu, 2017 ; Li et al, 2018 ; Tang et al, 2019 ). This is perhaps unsurprising given CI recipients' weaker and more variable abilities to extract pitch cues from acoustic signals (Tao et al, 2015 ; Mok et al, 2017 ; Vandali et al, 2017 ).…”