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To examine the relationship between lexical tone perception and melodic pitch perception in Mandarin-speaking cochlear implant (CI) users and to investigate the influence of previous acoustic hearing on CI users’ speech and music perception.

Most studies have evaluated cochlear implant (CI) performance using “clear” speech materials, which are highly intelligible and well articulated. CI users may encounter much greater variability in speech patterns in the “real world,” including synthetic speech. In this study, the authors measured sentence recognition with multiple talkers and speaking rates, and with naturally produced and synthetic speech in listeners with normal hearing (NH) and CIs.

This study investigated whether a spectral mismatch across ears influences the benefit of redundancy, squelch, and head shadow differently in speech perception using acoustic simulation of bilateral cochlear implant (CI) processing.

It was hypothesized that auditory training would allow bimodal patients to combine in a better manner the low-frequency acoustic information provided by a hearing aid with the electric information provided by a cochlear implant, thus maximizing the benefit of combining acoustic (A) and electric (E) stimulation (EAS).

While auditory training in quiet has been shown to improve cochlear implant (CI) users' speech understanding in quiet, it is unclear whether training in noise will benefit speech understanding in noise. The present study investigated whether auditory training could improve CI users' speech recognition in noise and whether training with familiar stimuli in an easy listening task (closed-set digit recognition) would improve recognition of unfamiliar stimuli in a more difficult task (open-set sentence recognition).

Cochlear implant listeners are able to at least partially adapt to the spectral mismatch associated with the implant device and speech processor via daily exposure and/or explicit training. The overall goal of this study was to investigate interactions between short-term unsupervised learning (i.e., passive adaptation) and the degree of spectral mismatch in normal-hearing listeners' adaptation to spectrally shifted vowels.

Fundamental frequency (F0) information is important to Chinese tone and speech recognition. Cochlear implant (CI) speech processors typically provide limited F0 information via temporal envelopes delivered to stimulating electrodes. Previous studies have shown that English-speaking CI users’ speech performance is correlated with amplitude modulation detection thresholds (AMDTs). The present study investigated whether Chinese-speaking CI users’ speech performance (especially tone recognition) is correlated with temporal processing capabilities.

While the cochlear implant provides many deaf patients with good speech understanding in quiet, music perception and appreciation with the cochlear implant remains a major challenge for most cochlear implant users. The present study investigated whether a closed-set melodic contour identification (MCI) task could be used to quantify cochlear implant users' ability to recognize musical melodies and whether MCI performance could be improved with moderate auditory training. The present study also compared MCI performance with familiar melody identification (FMI) performance, with and without MCI training.

Previous studies have shown that the protocol used for auditory training may significantly affect the outcome of training. However, it is unclear how often training should be performed to maximize its benefit. The present study investigated how the frequency of training contributed to normal-hearing listeners' adaptation to spectrally shifted speech.

To evaluate Mandarin-speaking cochlear implant patients’ understanding of telephone speech.