Objective: The purpose of the present study was to investigate the tone production performance of native Mandarin Chinese speaking children with cochlear implants and to evaluate the effects of age at implantation and duration of implant use on tone production in those children. Methods:Fourteen prelingually deaf children who had received cochlear implantation and 14 agematched normal-hearing children participated in the study. Both groups were of native Mandarin Chinese speaking children. One hundred and sixty tone tokens were recorded from each of the children. The total of 4480 tokens (160 × 28) were then used in tone perception tests in which seven normal-hearing native Mandarin Chinese speaking adults participated.Results-The tone production of the cochlear implant children showed tremendous individual variability. The group mean performance was 48.4% correct, statistically significantly lower than the group mean performance of 78.0% correct in the normal-hearing controls. The tone confusion matrix analysis revealed that the production of Mandarin tone 2 (the rising tone) was most severely impaired in the cochlear implant children, followed by tone 3 (the low and dipping tone) and tone 4 (the falling tone). The most frequently perceived tone irrespective of the target tone was tone 1 (the high level tone). The tone production performance was negatively correlated with the age at implantation and positively correlated with the duration of implant use. Conclusions:There is a remarkable deficit in tone production in a majority of native tone language speaking, prelingually deaf children who have received cochlear implants. While an increased duration of implant use might facilitate tone production, the age at implantation appears to have a negative effect on tone production in cochlear implant children. Therefore, early implantation might be beneficial to tone production in prelingually deaf children whose native language is a tone language.Keywords cochlear implant; tone production; pediatric; tone language; Mandarin Chinese * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 740 593 0310; fax: +1 740 593 0287. E-mail address: XuL@ohio.edu (L. Xu).Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. In a preliminary report, we showed that prelingually deafened native Mandarin speaking children who had received cochlear implants demonstrated various degrees of deficits in tone production [4]. Peng et al. (2004) also reported that a majority of their 30 prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants did not master Mandarin tone production [5]. There is a growing body of literature th...

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The coarse pitch information in cochlear implants might hinder the development of singing in prelingually-deafened pediatric users. In the present study, seven prelingually-deafened children with cochlear implants (5.4 to 12.3 years old) sang one song that was the most familiar to him or her. The control group consisted of 14 normal-hearing children (4.1 to 8.0 years old). The fundamental frequencies (F0) of each note in the recorded songs were extracted. The following five metrics were computed based on the reference music scores: (1) F0 contour direction of the adjacent notes, (2) F0 compression ratio of the entire song, (3) mean deviation of the normalized F0 across the notes, (4) mean deviation of the pitch intervals, and (5) standard deviation of the note duration differences. Children with cochlear implants showed significantly poorer performance in the pitch-based assessments than the normal-hearing children. No significant differences were seen between the two groups in the rhythm-based measure. Prelingually-deafened children with cochlear implants have significant deficits in singing due to their inability to manipulate pitch in the correct directions and to produce accurate pitch height. Future studies with a large sample size are warranted in order to account for the large variability in singing performance.

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