Tone production of Mandarin Chinese speaking children with cochlear implants

The purpose of the present study was to investigate 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.

Fourteen prelingually deaf children who had received cochlear implantation and 14 age-matched 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 (160x28) were then used in the tone perception tests in which seven normal-hearing native Mandarin Chinese speaking adults participated.

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.

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.