Fu Zhen, Yang Hongying, Chen Fei, Wu Xihong, Chen Jing
Department of Machine Intelligence, Speech and Hearing Research Center, Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education), Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, No. 1088 Xueyuan Blvd., Shenzhen, 518055, China.
Hear Res. 2019 Sep 1;380:123-136. doi: 10.1016/j.heares.2019.06.005. Epub 2019 Jun 27.
F0 contours convey the primary information of lexical Tones for Mandarin Chinese, and the processing of time-varying F0 contours is important for Mandarin concurrent-vowels identification (MCVI). In this work, we examined the relationship between frequency modulation (FM) detection of auditory system and MCVI in both normal-hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) listeners. Three experiments were conducted with the same subjects to measure their MCVI, FM detection limen (FMDL), and frequency following responses (FFRs) evoked by FM sweeps, respectively. To ensure that F0 contour was the primary cue utilized, mean F0s and durations were equalized among all test vowels in the MCVI experiment. To simulate the pattern of F0 contours of Mandarin vowels, linearly FM sweeps were used as stimuli in the FMDL and FFRs experiments. The results confirmed that the performance of HI listeners was significantly worse than that of NH listeners in all of the three measurements. Besides, FFRs evoked by FM sweeps had significantly lower tracking accuracy than those evoked by steady tones only for HI listeners. The correlation analysis further revealed that any two of the three measured indices were significantly correlated when the effects of age and absolute threshold were partialed out (|r| ≥ 0.502, p ≤ 0.017). These results suggested an association between the poor performance of HI listeners in the MCVI task and their degraded auditory function on FM detection, and such a behavioral degradation has emerged in the phase-locking activity at the brainstem level.
基频（F0）轮廓传达了汉语普通话词汇声调的主要信息，时变F0轮廓的处理对于普通话同时元音识别（MCVI）很重要。在这项研究中，我们考察了正常听力（NH）和听力受损（HI）听众的听觉系统调频（FM）检测与MCVI之间的关系。对同一组受试者进行了三项实验，分别测量他们的MCVI、FM检测阈限（FMDL）以及由FM扫描诱发的频率跟随反应（FFR）。为确保F0轮廓是所利用的主要线索，在MCVI实验中对所有测试元音的平均F0和时长进行了均衡处理。为模拟普通话元音的F0轮廓模式，在FMDL和FFR实验中使用线性FM扫描作为刺激。结果证实，在所有这三项测量中，HI听众的表现均显著差于NH听众。此外，仅对于HI听众，FM扫描诱发的FFR的跟踪精度显著低于稳定音调诱发的FFR。相关性分析进一步表明，当排除年龄和绝对阈值的影响后，三个测量指标中的任意两个均显著相关（|r|≥0.502，p≤0.017）。这些结果表明，HI听众在MCVI任务中的不佳表现与其在FM检测方面退化的听觉功能之间存在关联，并且这种行为退化已出现在脑干水平的锁相活动中。
