The effectiveness of sound‐processing strategies on tonal language cochlear implant users: A systematic review

Abstract

Importance: Contemporary cochlear implants (CIs) are well established as a technology for people with severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss, with their effectiveness having been widely reported. However, for tonal language CI recipients, speech perception remains a challenge: Conventional signal processing strategies have been demonstrated to possibly provide insufficient information to encode tonal cues, and CI recipients have exhibited considerable deficits in tone perception.Thus, some tonal language-oriented sound-processing strategies have been introduced. The effects of available tonal language-oriented strategies on tone perception are reviewed and evaluated in this study. The results may aid in designing and improving tonal language-appropriate sound-processing strategies for CI recipients.Objective: The objective of this systematic review was to investigate the effects of tonal-language-oriented signal processing strategies on tone perception, music perception, word and sentence recognition. Methods:To evaluate the effects of tonal language-oriented strategies on tone perception, we conducted a systematic review. We searched for relevant reports dated from January 1979 to July 2017 using PubMed, Cochrane Library, EBSCO, Web of Science, EMBASE, and 4 Chinese periodical databases (CBMdisc, CNKI, VIP, and Wanfang Data).Results: According to our search strategy, 672 potentially eligible studies were retrieved from the databases, with 12 of these studies included in the final review after a 4-stage selection process. The majority of sound-processing strategies designed for tonal language were HiResolution â with Fidelity 120 (HiRes 120), fine structure processing, temporal fine structure (TFS), and C-tone. Generally, acute or short-term comparisons between the tonal language-oriented strategies and the conventional strategy did not reveal statistically significant differences in speech perception (or show a small improvement). However, a tendency toward improved tone perception and subjectively reported overall preferred sound quality was observed with the tonal language-oriented strategies.Interpretation: Conventional signal processing strategies typically provided very limited F0 information via temporal envelopes delivered to the stimulating electrodes.In contrast, tonal language-oriented coding strategies attempted to present more These reports have shown that CI provides a fairly high level of speech perception in the majority of users, especially in quiet conditions. However, other reports have indicated that CI recipients exhibit considerable deficits in tone perception of native tonal language speakers, especially among prelingually deafened tonal language children. 4-13Sound-processing strategies are the core of CI technology, temporary cues that can be delivered by the CIS. 16 Because these features are critical for speech perception, the CIS is a standard and widely used coding strategy in CIs. However, the CIS delivers only little fine structure information and presents only envel...

Singing Proficiency of Members of a Choir Formed by Prelingually Deafened Children With Cochlear Implants

“…So far, many studies have documented the deficits in tone perception and production in prelingually deafened children with CIs (Y. Chen & Wong, 2017; Ciocca, Francis, Aisha, & Wong, 2002; Han et al, 2007; Liu, Peng, Zhao, & Ni, 2017; Mao & Xu, 2017; Peng, Weiss, Cheung, & Lin, 2004; Tan, Dowell, & Vogel, 2016; Xu et al, 2004, 2011; Xu & Zhou, 2011). In studies evaluating music perception in CI recipients, researchers have found that, although CI users perform relatively well on rhythm perception such as rhythm pattern recognition and rhythm discrimination, they show evident deficiency in pitch-related tasks such as pitch discrimination, pitch ranking, melody contour identification, and so forth (Cooper, Tobey, & Loizou, 2008; Galvin, Fu, & Nogaki, 2007; Gfeller et al, 2007; Limb & Rubinstein, 2012; McDermott, 2004; Scorpecci et al, 2012).…”

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 ).…”

Acoustic Assessment of Tone Production of Prelingually-Deafened Mandarin-Speaking Children With Cochlear Implants

“…Pitch information is not adequately coded in the contemporary envelope-based speech processing strategies in which fixed-rate electrical stimulations delivered to a small number of CI electrodes result in poor pitch perception in CI users ( Wilson and Dorman, 2008 ; Xu and Zhou, 2011 ). At present, numerous studies have reported that there are considerable deficits in Mandarin tone recognition for CI children (see Tan et al, 2016 ; Chen and Wong, 2017 ; Liu et al, 2017 for reviews). For example, Zhou et al (2013) and Mao and Xu (2017) reported that CI children achieved Mandarin tone recognition of 67.3 to 82.3% correct, whereas their normal-hearing (NH) counterpart obtained > 95% correct.…”