Musical pitch and lexical tone perception with cochlear implants.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of the present study was to test the hypothesis that cochlear implant (CI) users' music perception is correlated with their lexical tone perception, and the two types of perception share similar mechanisms in electric hearing. DESIGN A lexical tone perception test and a pitch interval discrimination test were administered to a group of CI users and a group of normal-hearing (NH) listeners. SAMPLE STUDY: Nineteen adult CI users and 10 NH listeners who are native-Mandarin-Chinese speakers participated in the study. RESULT Tone-perception performance of the CI group was, on average, 58.3% correct (± 19.78% correct), and performance of the NH group was near perfect. The CI group had a mean threshold of 5.66 semitones (± 5.57 semitones) in pitch discrimination as compared to the threshold of 0.44 semitone from the NH group. There was a strong correlation between the CI users' tone-perception performance and their pitch discrimination threshold (r = -0.75, p < 0.001). CONCLUSION Musical and lexical pitch perceptions are strongly correlated with each other and they might share similar mechanisms in electric hearing.