Effects of voice gender and noise on Mandarin tone perception by cochlear implant users

The present study investigated the effect of voice gender on Mandarin tone perception by cochlear implant users who speak Chinese. Six cochlear implant users were recruited in this study with their own devices. Psychoacoustic experiment on Mandarin tone perception was carried out with the use of 160 monosyllabic words uttered by a male speaker and a female speaker. Clean speech materials and their noisy counterpart at 10 dB signal-to-noise ratio were tested. Experimental result showed that cochlear implant users could achieve relatively good Mandarin tone perception of 72% correct at clean condition. However, the tone perception performance significantly degraded in noise environment. No significant differences were found between male voice and female voice. Electrodogram analysis indicated that tone-related information was severely masked by noise on the electrode output of cochlear implant.