Tone perception performance of Cantonese-speaking prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants

(Uncorrected OCR) Abstract of dissertation entitled Tone Perception Performance of Cantonese-speaking Prelingually Deaf Children with Cochlear Implants submitted by Angela On-Chi Wong for the degree of Master of Sciences in Audiology at the University of Hong Kong in May 2000 The present study was a preliminary investigation on the tone perception performance of pre lingually hearing-impaired children with cochlear implant. Seventeen native Cantonese-speaking participants were invited in this research. They have been using the Nucleus multichannel cochlear implant with coding strategy of either SPEAK or ACE. Errors from the tone discrimination and the tone identification tests were examined and a tone confusion matrix was plotted. Results revealed that the correct scores for both discrimination and identification tests were slightly above chance levels, indicating that prelingually hearing-impaired children using cochlear implants were able to benefit from SPEAK or ACE strategies for Cantonese tone perception, though the benefit was small. Tonal error and confusion patterns were discussed and some contributing possibilities were suggested. Relationships between tone perception VII performance and other variables such as age at implantation, duration of implantation, frequency of training and overall auditory performance were also examined. The paper also discussed other possibilities that may contribute to tone confusion. VIIItocabstractSpeech and Hearing SciencesMasterMaster of Science in Audiolog