Prosody perception and musical pitch discrimination in adults using cochlear implants

This study investigated prosodic perception and musical pitch discrimination in adults using cochlear implants (CI), and examined the relationship between prosody perception scores and non-linguistic auditory measures, demographic variables, and speech recognition scores.

Participants were given four subtests of the PEPS-C (profiling elements of prosody in speech-communication), the adult paralanguage subtest of the DANVA 2 (diagnostic analysis of non verbal accuracy 2), and the contour and interval subtests of the MBEA (Montreal battery of evaluation of amusia).

Twelve CI users aged 25;5 to 78;0 years participated.

CI participants performed significantly more poorly than normative values for New Zealand adults for PEPS-C turn-end, affect, and contrastive stress reception subtests, but were not different from the norm for the chunking reception subtest. Performance on the DANVA 2 adult paralanguage subtest was lower than the normative mean reported by Saindon (2010) . Most of the CI participants performed at chance level on both MBEA subtests.

CI users have difficulty perceiving prosodic information accurately. Difficulty in understanding different aspects of prosody and music may be associated with reduced pitch perception ability.