| This study investigated the ability of Taiwanese pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients who speak a tonal language to recognize familiar melodies. It further examined the relative contributions of pitch, rhythm and verbal cues to melody recognition, as well as relationships between melody and speech recognition, with an emphasis on the perception of pitch and tonal elements of Mandarin.; Participants were Taiwanese children between the age of 7 and 15. Thirty-eight prelingually deaf pediatric CI recipients of Nucleus devices, and 30 children with normal hearing were tested on the following measures: the Mandarin Melody Recognition Test, a latency response measure, an open-lyrics recognition measure, and the Mandarin Tone Test. The stimuli for the melody recognition task were presented in three conditions: (1) pitch only, with isochronous rhythm, (2) rhythm plus pitch, and (3) lyrics, rhythm, and pitch. Perceptual accuracy scores and response time for melody recognition of pediatric CI recipients were compared with data from normal-hearing (NH) children in Taiwan. In addition, the relationships between perceptual accuracy for melody and Mandarin speech as well as demographic variables were examined.; The results showed that Taiwanese pediatric CI recipients performed significantly less accurately (p < .001) than their NH counterparts when melody recognition was based on pitch and rhythm features in a closed-set task. However, their performance was similar in the lyrics condition. Among the three key components (pitch, rhythm and lyrics), linguistic cues appeared to be the most salient, rhythmic patterns to be somewhat beneficial, and pitch information remained challenging to employ in identifying melody in a closed-set task. Taiwanese pediatric CI recipients required significantly longer segments of the target song excerpts to determine an answer (p < .001) than their NH counterparts, regardless of the format of the melodies presented (i.e. with and without lyrics or rhythmic patterns). Significant correlations with moderate strength were found between speech perception and melody recognition in two conditions (pitch-only and rhythm-plus-pitch). Demographic variables (i.e. age, hearing history or music involvement) were weakly correlated with melody recognition accuracy. |
