The effect of lexical tone experience on English intonation perception in Mandarin-speaking cochlear-implanted children

Abstract

To examine the effect of lexical tone experience on English intonation perception in Mandarin-speaking cochlear-implanted children during second language acquisition in Taiwan. A retrospective cohort study. A tertiary referred center. Fourteen children with cochlear implant (CI) in the experimental group, and 9 normal hearing children in the control group were enrolled in this study. Cochlear implantation and hearing rehabilitation. Two speech recognition accuracies were examined: (1) Lexical tone recognition (4-alternative forced choice, AFC), (2) English Sentence Intonation (2AFC). The overall accuracies for tone perception are 61.13% (standard deviation, SD = 10.84%) for CI group and 93.82% (SD = 1.80%) for normal hearing group. Tone 4 and Tone 1 were more easily to be recognized than tone 2 and tone 3 in the pediatric CI recipients (cCI) group. In English intonation perception, the overall accuracies are 61.82% (SD = 16.85%) for CI group, and 97.59% (SD = 4.73%) for normal hearing group. Significant high correlation (R = .919, P ≦ .000) between lexical tone perception and English intonation perception is noted. There is no significant difference for English intonation perception accuracies between Mandarin-speaking cCI (61.82%) and English-speaking cCI (70.13%, P = .11). Mandarin-speaking cochlear-implanted children showed significant deficits in perception of lexical tone and English intonation relative to normal hearing children. There was no tonal language benefit in Mandarin-speaking cochlear-implanted children’s English intonation perception, compared to the English-speaking cochlear-implanted peers. For cochlear-implanted children, better lexical tone perception comes with better English intonation perception. Enhancing Mandarin prosodic perception for cochlear-implanted children may benefit their command of intonation in English.

Cochlear-implant Mandarin tone recognition with a disyllabic word corpus

“…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 ).…”