Prosody perception by postlingually-deafened cochlear implant recipients: a cross-language investigation

Due to the inherent device limitations of cochlear implants (CI) and of auditory perception via an electrical-neural interface, the ability of CI listeners to perceive prosody is often reported as being worse than that of normal-hearing listeners. We tested the perceptual ability of postlingually-deafened adult CI listeners with stimuli where prosodic features signalled distinctive semantic contrasts. These contrasts were tested with a Danish (n=18) and a Swedish (n=21) cohort in quiet and in noise. We also tested other speech perceptual abilities that could be linked to prosody perception. These included word recognition, sentence perception in noise, and vowel identification. Results of this study show that speech-in-noise ability by CI listeners is related to abilities that underlie vowel identification, while word recognition is related to the identification of compound words and phrases. Comparison of the mean identification rates of the prosodic tasks showed that there was a disparity in the performance of Danish and Swedish CI listeners over tasks that are similar in both languages.