Confusions of Cantonese Tones in Teenagers with Sensorineural Hearing Impairment

The goals of this study were to find out how the identifiability of Cantonese tones was affected by the degree of hearing impairment and for two stimulus conditions. Twenty-two subjects were assigned to three subject groups: normal hearing (n = 8), moderate-to-severe hearing loss (n = 6), and profound hearing loss (n = 8)A tonal identification task of the segmental unit /fu/ and the So & Varley Lexical Comprehension Test (So & Varley, 1991) were employed. All stimuli were presented in isolation and in carrier sentences. As expected, average performance fell with increasing hearing impairment. A significant effect for the sets of stimuli was found in the So & Varley Lexical Comprehension Test for the two hearing-impaired groups the moderate-to-severe-hearing-loss subjects performed better in the carrier phrase condition and the profound-hearing-loss subjects in isolation. Stimuli, therefore, should be taken into consideration in assessment and intervention with subjects with different degree of hearing impairment