Intonational Contrasts with a Cochlear Implant

This paper presents a case study on the linguistic use of fundamental frequency (F0), amplitude, and duration by a post-lingually deafened adult speaker with a cochlear implant. Although multi-channel cochlear implants do not have good resolution of F0, it has been reported anecdotally that the intonation of cochlear implant users sounds “fine” in conversations. This observation implies that post-lingually deafened adults may be relying on very robust phonological representations of intonational contrasts, even in the face of degraded phonetic input. To address this issue, we developed an imitation task for eliciting intonational contrasts, which was piloted with a post-lingually deafened adult who had received a cochlear implant and with a matched, normal-hearing subject. Recordings from the imitation task were used as stimuli in a set of perception experiments using normalhearing, college-aged listeners. The results of these perception experiments showed, as expected, no statistical difference between listeners’ judgments of utterances as produced by the cochlear implant user and by the normal hearing speaker. These findings provide a good baseline study of the perception and production of intonational contrasts by a skilled, post-lingually deafened cochlear implant user.