Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 18, 2026
Systematic Hearing Performance Evaluation Process for Adolescents with Cochlear Implantation at Early Ages
Published on: March 24, 2023
Effects of temporal fine structure stimulation on Mandarin speech recognition in cochlear implant users
Beier Qi1, Andreas Krenmayr, Ning Zhang
1Beijing Tong Ren Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing Institute of Otolaryngology, Key Laboratory of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery, Ministry of Education, Beijing, China.
Conclusion:
The investigated experimental coding strategies significantly improved tone identification as compared with the participants' everyday audio processor settings. However, this benefit could not be attributed entirely to temporal fine structure stimulation but seems to be caused by decreasing the lower corner frequency of the filter bank. The 6 week habituation period used in this study might have been too short to allow the listeners to derive additional lexical information from the unfamiliar stimulation patterns.
Objectives:
To evaluate a cochlear implant coding strategy that explicitly conveys temporal fine structure information in the context of the tonal language Mandarin.
Methods:
The study was designed as a longitudinal, monocentric, prospective, controlled, and randomized cross-over study and included 12 postlingually deafened adults, who were experienced cochlear implant users. Two experimental coding strategies, one of which explicitly presents temporal fine structure information, were compared to the participants' personal TEMPO+ speech processors, which do not convey fine structure information.
Results:
Both experimental coding strategies improved tone identification by approximately 11 percentage points. This improvement was significant in the female speaker test. Sentence perception, as assessed with the M-HINT test, and quality of life scores were identical with all three coding strategies.
