Prelingually Deaf Children With Cochlear Implants Show Better Perception of Voice Cues and Speech in Competing Speech Than Postlingually Deaf Adults With Cochlear Implants

Objectives: Postlingually deaf adults with cochlear implants (CIs) have difficulties with perceiving differences in speakers’ voice characteristics and benefit little from voice differences for the perception of speech in competing speech. However, not much is known yet about the perception and use of voice characteristics in prelingually deaf implanted children with CIs. Unlike CI adults, most CI children became deaf during the acquisition of language. Extensive neuroplastic changes during childhood could make CI children better at using the available acoustic cues than CI adults, or the lack of exposure to a normal acoustic speech signal could make it more difficult for them to learn which acoustic cues they should attend to. This study aimed to examine to what degree CI children can perceive voice cues and benefit from voice differences for perceiving speech in competing speech, comparing their abilities to those of normal-hearing (NH) children and CI adults. Design: CI children’s voice cue discrimination (experiment 1), voice gender categorization (experiment 2), and benefit from target-masker voice differences for perceiving speech in competing speech (experiment 3) were examined in three experiments. The main focus was on the perception of mean fundamental frequency (F0) and vocal-tract length (VTL), the primary acoustic cues related to speakers’ anatomy and perceived voice characteristics, such as voice gender. Results: CI children’s F0 and VTL discrimination thresholds indicated lower sensitivity to differences compared with their NH-age-equivalent peers, but their mean discrimination thresholds of 5.92 semitones (st) for F0 and 4.10 st for VTL indicated higher sensitivity than postlingually deaf CI adults with mean thresholds of 9.19 st for F0 and 7.19 st for VTL. Furthermore, CI children’s perceptual weighting of F0 and VTL cues for voice gender categorization closely resembled that of their NH-age-equivalent peers, in contrast with CI adults. Finally, CI children had more difficulties in perceiving speech in competing speech than their NH-age-equivalent peers, but they performed better than CI adults. Unlike CI adults, CI children showed a benefit from target-masker voice differences in F0 and VTL, similar to NH children. Conclusion: Although CI children’s F0 and VTL voice discrimination scores were overall lower than those of NH children, their weighting of F0 and VTL cues for voice gender categorization and their benefit from target-masker differences in F0 and VTL resembled that of NH children. Together, these results suggest that prelingually deaf implanted CI children can effectively utilize spectrotemporally degraded F0 and VTL cues for voice and speech perception, generally outperforming postlingually deaf CI adults in comparable tasks. These findings underscore the presence of F0 and VTL cues in the CI signal to a certain degree and suggest other factors contributing to the perception challenges faced by CI adults.