A Neurophysiological Study of Musical Pitch Identification in Mandarin-Speaking Cochlear Implant Users.

A Neurophysiological Study of Musical Pitch Identification in Mandarin-Speaking Cochlear Implant Users. Neural Plast. 2020;2020:4576729 Authors: Cai J, Liu Y, Yao M, Xu M, Zhang H Abstract Music perception in cochlear implant (CI) users is far from satisfactory, not only because of the technological limitations of current CI devices but also due to the neurophysiological alterations that generally accompany deafness. Early behavioral studies revealed that similar mechanisms underlie musical and lexical pitch perception in CI-based electric hearing. Although neurophysiological studies of the musical pitch perception of English-speaking CI users are actively ongoing, little such research has been conducted with Mandarin-speaking CI users; as Mandarin is a tonal language, these individuals require pitch information to understand speech. The aim of this work was to study the neurophysiological mechanisms accounting for the musical pitch identification abilities of Mandarin-speaking CI users and normal-hearing (NH) listeners. Behavioral and mismatch negativity (MMN) data were analyzed to examine musical pitch processing performance. Moreover, neurophysiological results from CI users with good and bad pitch discrimination performance (according to the just-noticeable differences (JND) and pitch-direction discrimination (PDD) tasks) were compared to identify cortical responses associated with musical pitch perception differences. The MMN ex...
Source: Neural Plasticity - Category: Neurology Authors: Tags: Neural Plast Source Type: research