China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Tinnitus and Hyperacusis
Published in John C Watkinson, Raymond W Clarke, Christopher P Aldren, Doris-Eva Bamiou, Raymond W Clarke, Richard M Irving, Haytham Kubba, Shakeel R Saeed, Paediatrics, The Ear, Skull Base, 2018
One of the theories regarding the pathophysiology of tinnitus is that it is due to increased neural synchrony in the central auditory system (see above). It was suggested that a specific form of sound stimulation could be used to disrupt this pathological synchrony: four tones are delivered via headphones, two above and two below the dominant frequency of the patient’s tinnitus. The technology is known as Acoustic CR (Co-ordinated Reset) Neuromodulation and initial research looked promising.91,92 An RCT was planned.93 This research was undertaken but the results were not published owing to deviations from the trial protocol. Following a freedom-of-information request by a UK tinnitus charity, a limited disclosure of the results was published online.94 This stated that the end-of-study report did not report a significant difference in the primary outcome measure (global Tinnitus Handicap Questionnaire scores) between the treatment group and the placebo group.
Mandarin lexical tone recognition in bimodal cochlear implant users
Published in International Journal of Audiology, 2020
Qian Zhou, Jintao Bi, Haoheng Song, Xin Gu, Bo Liu
For tonal languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, lexical tones make an essential contribution to understanding the meaning of words and sentences. Mandarin Chinese is a typical tonal language that includes four tones: the high-level tone (tone 1, T1), the rising tone (tone 2, T2), the falling-rising tone (tone 3, T3) and the high-falling tone (tone 4, T4). These tones play an important role in understanding the meaning of monosyllabic words in Chinese language. Many studies have demonstrated remarkable deficits in tone recognition in CI users (Han et al. 2007, 2009; Xu and Zhou 2011; Zhou et al. 2013, Chen and Wong 2017; Liu et al. 2017). Improving CI users tone-recognition ability would effectively enhance overall speech perception. The primary acoustical cue for tone recognition is the fundamental frequency (F0) or the F0 contour of the syllables (see Xu and Zhou, 2011 for a review). When the F0 information is obscure in speech signals, other acoustic characteristics, such as duration and amplitude envelope cues, also contribute to tone recognition (Fu et al. 1998; Fu and Zeng 2000; Xu, Tsai, and Pfingst 2002; Luo and Fu 2004; Kong and Zeng 2006). Due to limitations in the coding of F0 in CI systems and in the associated neural interface, CI users experience various degrees of difficulty in perceiving lexical tones, especially in noise (Peng et al. 2004; Han et al. 2009; Wang, Zhou, and Xu 2011; Xu and Zhou 2011; Zhou et al. 2013; Li et al. 2014; Tao et al. 2015; Mao and Xu 2013, 2017).
Construction and evaluation of the Mandarin Chinese matrix (CMNmatrix) sentence test for the assessment of speech recognition in noise
Published in International Journal of Audiology, 2018
Hongmei Hu, Xin Xi, Lena L. N. Wong, Sabine Hochmuth, Anna Warzybok, Birger Kollmeier
In order to construct a base matrix, some of the major differences between the major Western languages (e.g. English and German) and the Mandarin language must be addressed in the first place, especially those related to the issue of intelligibility. Mandarin is the most common spoken language in the world and is very different from English. Firstly, Mandarin consists of a sequence of characters, each representing a syllable which has a particular meaning and pronunciation. It may exist alone or be combined with other characters to provide a different meaning. Secondly, as a tonal language, each spoken Mandarin syllable is identified by the combination of phonetic and tonal attributes. Both of them have to be considered to identify a particular word. Mandarin consists of 23 initial consonants, 38 finals and four tones plus a neutral tone (Ma and Shen 2004). The syllable structure of Mandarin consists of an optional initial consonant, a vowel (carrying the tone) and an optional final consonant (mostly “n” or “ng”)2. The four tones have different pitch contours: high-level (Tone 1), mid-rising (Tone 2), mid-falling-rising (Tone 3) and high-falling (Tone 4). The neutral tone (Tone 0) is often described as lack of tonal contour. In fact, a numeric method of representing tones is presented in Zhao (1935)’s study, where the pitch range is divided into five levels, with 1 being the lowest, 3 being mid-range and 5 the highest.