Tone perception performance of Cantonese-speaking prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants

Abstract

(Uncorrected OCR) Abstract of dissertation entitled

Tone Perception Performance of Cantonese-speaking Prelingually

Deaf Children with Cochlear Implants

submitted by

Angela On-Chi Wong

for the degree of Master of Sciences in Audiology

at the University of Hong Kong

in May 2000

The present study was a preliminary investigation on the tone perception performance

of pre lingually hearing-impaired children with cochlear implant. Seventeen native

Cantonese-speaking participants were invited in this research. They have been using

the Nucleus multichannel cochlear implant with coding strategy of either SPEAK or

ACE. Errors from the tone discrimination and the tone identification tests were

examined and a tone confusion matrix was plotted. Results revealed that the correct

scores for both discrimination and identification tests were slightly above chance

levels, indicating that prelingually hearing-impaired children using cochlear implants

were able to benefit from SPEAK or ACE strategies for Cantonese tone perception,

though the benefit was small. Tonal error and confusion patterns were discussed and

some contributing possibilities were suggested. Relationships between tone perception

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performance and other variables such as age at implantation, duration of implantation,

frequency of training and overall auditory performance were also examined. The

paper also discussed other possibilities that may contribute to tone confusion.

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