Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Beijing TongRen Hospital, Capital Medical University, Ministry of Education of China, Beijing, People's Republic of China.
Department of Head and Neck Surgery, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Trends Hear. 2016 Jun 30;20:2331216516654022. doi: 10.1177/2331216516654022.
Cochlear implant (CI) speech performance is typically evaluated using well-enunciated speech produced at a normal rate by a single talker. CI users often have greater difficulty with variations in speech production encountered in everyday listening. Within a single talker, speaking rate, amplitude, duration, and voice pitch information may be quite variable, depending on the production context. The coarse spectral resolution afforded by the CI limits perception of voice pitch, which is an important cue for speech prosody and for tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese. In this study, sentence recognition from the Mandarin speech perception database was measured in adult and pediatric Mandarin-speaking CI listeners for a variety of speaking styles: voiced speech produced at slow, normal, and fast speaking rates; whispered speech; voiced emotional speech; and voiced shouted speech. Recognition of Mandarin Hearing in Noise Test sentences was also measured. Results showed that performance was significantly poorer with whispered speech relative to the other speaking styles and that performance was significantly better with slow speech than with fast or emotional speech. Results also showed that adult and pediatric performance was significantly poorer with Mandarin Hearing in Noise Test than with Mandarin speech perception sentences at the normal rate. The results suggest that adult and pediatric Mandarin-speaking CI patients are highly susceptible to whispered speech, due to the lack of lexically important voice pitch cues and perhaps other qualities associated with whispered speech. The results also suggest that test materials may contribute to differences in performance observed between adult and pediatric CI users.
人工耳蜗（CI）的言语表现通常通过单一说话者以正常语速清晰发音的言语来评估。CI 用户在日常聆听中遇到的言语产生变化时，往往会遇到更大的困难。在单一说话者中，语速、幅度、持续时间和语音音高信息可能会有很大变化，这取决于产生的语境。CI 提供的粗糙光谱分辨率限制了对语音音高的感知，语音音高是言语韵律和汉语等声调语言的重要线索。在这项研究中，对成年和儿童普通话 CI 使用者进行了各种说话方式的普通话言语感知数据库中的句子识别测试：慢、正常和快语速的浊音言语；低语；有情绪的浊音言语；以及有情绪的大喊大叫的浊音言语。还测量了 Mandarin Hearing in Noise Test 句子的识别。结果表明，与其他说话方式相比，低语的表现明显更差，与快语速或有情绪的语速相比，慢语速的表现明显更好。结果还表明，与正常语速的普通话言语感知句子相比，成人和儿童的 Mandarin Hearing in Noise Test 表现明显更差。结果表明，成人和儿童普通话 CI 患者对低语非常敏感，这是由于缺乏词汇上重要的语音音高线索，以及与低语相关的其他特征。结果还表明，测试材料可能导致成人和儿童 CI 用户之间观察到的表现差异。
