The Study Of Chinese Tonal Category Perception And Noise Quality In Children With Cochlear Implants

The cochlear implant is an electronic device that helps patients with severe or extremely severe deafness to regain hearing. With the development of cochlear implantation technology,the auditory perception and speech output of pre-deaf children have been greatly improved.However, there are still obvious obstacles compared with normal children. On the study of this issue, specifically for the Chinese mother tongue children is still rare. Considering the uniqueness of the tone language, this paper investigates the characteristics of the cochlear implanted children in Chinese tone perception and voice quality. This article recruited 10 (4-5 years) Chinese Mandarin cochlear implanted children (all pre-deaf) and 10 normal hearing children and 10 nonnal hearing adults. Each group are 3 females 7 male combination.Perceptual identification tests were performed using two continuums (ST1-ST2) Level-Rising Tones and (ST1-ST4) Level-Falling tones, which based on fundamental frequency variation synthesis. Each group of subjects completed the two tone continuums of the perceptual experiments, including cochlear implantation in children were single-mode (only the right ear wearing cochlear implant) and dual-mode (right ear wearing cochlear and left ear wearing a hearing aid) condition to complete the perception experiment.In addition, the cochlear implantation group and the normal group of children also completed a continuous vowel (/ a /, / i /, / u /) output experiment to examine the voice sound quality differences to spy on the Cochlear implanted children may exist in the voice problem.The results show that:(1) Cochlear implantation of children and normal children in the ST1-ST2, ST1- ST4 of the identification test have shown certain categorical characteristics.(2) Because the hearing aid has not been fine adjustment, cochlear implanted children's perception of Chinese tones, it is difficult to highlight the dual-mode advantage, but in the single-mode performance better.(3) The sensitivity of the cochlear implanted children in the mandarin tone continuum was similar to that of the normal children in the single-mode state, while in the dual-mode state sensitivity but lower.(4) Whether it is cochlear implanted children, normal children or normal adults, the categorical perception in ST1-ST4 tone continuum than in ST1-ST2 tone continuum perception stronger.(5) Normal adults, whether in the perception of ST1-ST2 or ST1-ST4 tone continuum, the perception of the category are higher than the normal children and cochlear implantation of children.(6) Cochlear implanted children's vowel acoustics space is smaller than normal children's vowel acoustics spatial area.(7) For the continuous unit sound /a/ output, cochlear implanted children's vocal cord closed incomplete.In this paper, we investigated the categorization of tonal perception in cochlear implants and compared the results of tonal continuum perception of cochlear implanted children in two modes. At the same time, from the basic frequency, the first formant, the second formant and the vowel acoustic space and the harmonic difference of these acoustic parameters, we discovered some voice quality problem of cochlear implanted children, provided a reference for speech rehabilitation therapy.