Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, P.O. Box 9101, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2010 Oct;128(4):1884-95. doi: 10.1121/1.3474236.
Cochlear implants are largely unable to encode voice pitch information, which hampers the perception of some prosodic cues, such as intonation. This study investigated whether children with a cochlear implant in one ear were better able to detect differences in intonation when a hearing aid was added in the other ear ("bimodal fitting"). Fourteen children with normal hearing and 19 children with bimodal fitting participated in two experiments. The first experiment assessed the just noticeable difference in F0, by presenting listeners with a naturally produced bisyllabic utterance with an artificially manipulated pitch accent. The second experiment assessed the ability to distinguish between questions and affirmations in Dutch words, again by using artificial manipulation of F0. For the implanted group, performance significantly improved in each experiment when the hearing aid was added. However, even with a hearing aid, the implanted group required exaggerated F0 excursions to perceive a pitch accent and to identify a question. These exaggerated excursions are close to the maximum excursions typically used by Dutch speakers. Nevertheless, the results of this study showed that compared to the implant only condition, bimodal fitting improved the perception of intonation.
人工耳蜗在很大程度上无法编码语音音高信息，这阻碍了对某些韵律线索的感知，如语调。本研究调查了单侧植入人工耳蜗的儿童在对侧耳朵（“双耳模式”）佩戴助听器时是否能够更好地察觉语调差异。14 名正常听力儿童和 19 名双耳模式佩戴儿童参与了两个实验。第一个实验通过呈现一个自然产生的双音节词，并对其音高重音进行人为操控，评估了 F0 的可察觉差异。第二个实验通过对 F0 进行人为操控，评估了在荷兰语单词中区分疑问句和肯定句的能力。对于植入组，当佩戴助听器时，每个实验的表现都显著提高。然而，即使佩戴了助听器，植入组也需要夸张的 F0 变化才能感知音高重音并识别疑问句。这些夸张的变化接近荷兰语使用者通常使用的最大变化。尽管如此，这项研究的结果表明，与仅植入人工耳蜗的情况相比，双耳模式改善了语调感知。
