Deroche Mickael L D, Lu Hui-Ping, Lin Yung-Song, Chatterjee Monita, Peng Shu-Chen
Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Chi-Mei Medical Center, Tainan, Taiwan.
Front Neurosci. 2019 Jun 20;13:639. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2019.00639. eCollection 2019.
This study examined the utilization of multiple types of acoustic information in lexical tone production and perception by pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients who are native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Lexical tones were recorded from CI recipients and their peers with normal hearing (NH). Each participant was asked to produce a disyllabic word, , with which the first syllable was pronounced as Tone 3 (a low dipping tone) while the second syllable was pronounced as Tone 1 (a high level tone, meaning "eyes") or as Tone 4 (a high falling tone, meaning "eyeglasses"). In addition, a parametric manipulation in fundamental frequency (F0) and duration of Tones 1 and 4 used in a lexical tone recognition task in Peng et al. (2017) was adopted to evaluate the perceptual reliance on each dimension. Mixed-effect analyses of duration, intensity, and F0 cues revealed that NH children focused exclusively on marking distinct F0 contours, while CI participants shortened Tone 4 or prolonged Tone 1 to enhance their contrast. In line with these production strategies, NH children relied primarily on F0 cues to identify the two tones, whereas CI children showed greater reliance on duration cues. Moreover, CI participants who placed greater perceptual weight on duration cues also tended to exhibit smaller changes in their F0 production. Pediatric CI recipients appear to contrast the secondary acoustic dimension (duration) in addition to F0 contours for both lexical tone production and perception. These findings suggest that perception and production strategies of lexical tones are well coupled in this pediatric CI population.
本研究考察了以汉语为母语的小儿人工耳蜗（CI）植入者在词汇声调产生和感知过程中对多种声学信息的利用情况。记录了CI植入者及其听力正常（NH）的同龄人发出的词汇声调。要求每位参与者说出一个双音节词，其中第一个音节发第三声（低降调），而第二个音节发第一声（高平调，意为“眼睛”）或第四声（高降调，意为“眼镜”）。此外，采用了Peng等人（2017年）在词汇声调识别任务中对第一声和第四声的基频（F0）和时长进行的参数操纵，以评估对每个维度的感知依赖程度。对时长、强度和F0线索的混合效应分析表明，NH儿童只专注于标记不同的F0轮廓，而CI植入者会缩短第四声或延长第一声以增强它们之间的对比度。与这些发音策略一致，NH儿童主要依靠F0线索来识别这两个声调，而CI儿童则更依赖时长线索。此外，在时长线索上赋予更大感知权重的CI参与者在F0发音上的变化也往往更小。小儿CI植入者在词汇声调的产生和感知方面，似乎除了F0轮廓外，还会利用次要声学维度（时长）来形成对比。这些发现表明，在这个小儿CI人群中，词汇声调的感知和发音策略紧密相关。
