Lexical tone recognition in noise in normal-hearing children and prelingually deafened children with cochlear implants.
Yitao Mao, Li Xu
PMID 27564095WHAT IT FOUND
Children with cochlear implants recognized Mandarin tones worse than normal-hearing peers, and noise worsened them further.
Tone 2 and 3 were most confused. In quiet, their scores were like normal-hearing children at -6 dB.
Key findings
01Children with cochlear implants scored 82.3% correct in quiet and 59.6% correct at 0 dB SNR, while normal-hearing children scored 95.3% correct in quiet and 92.3% correct at 0 dB SNR.
02Normal-hearing children scored 95.3%, 94.4%, 94.5%, and 92.3% correct in quiet, +12 dB, +6 dB, and 0 dB SNR, then 77.5% at -6 dB.
03Tone 2 and tone 3 were the most confused pair and the hardest tone contrast for both groups.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The cochlear implant group ranged from 2.13 to 17.20 years old, from 0.60 to 16.50 years at implantation, and from 0.17 to 8.49 years of implant use, so one group score may not fit each child. Children with cochlear implants were not tested at -6 dB, so the study cannot say how they would perform at the noisiest level used for normal-hearing children. The correlations between age at implantation and tone recognition were weak and not corrected for multiple comparisons; if corrected, none were significant. The study tested single-word tone recognition, not sentence recognition in noise, so it does not show how tone errors affect continuous speech recognition. The groups were not randomly assigned and were comparable on chronological age, so other differences may contribute to performance. All children with cochlear implants also received post-operative aural rehabilitation, so the study cannot separate the contribution of the implant, rehabilitation, or hearing loss history.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The study was supported in part by NIH NIDCD grant R15-DC014587.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that early implantation reliably improves tone recognition. The age-at-implantation correlations were weak and not corrected for multiple comparisons. If corrected, none were significant.