Acoustic cues utilized by normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners are different for Mandarin concurrent-vowels identification

Lexical Tones provide semantic meaning for Chinese words, and they are inherently bonded with vowels for Chinese speech. The present work examined the effect of lexical Tone contrast on concurrent-vowels identification for both normal-hearing (NH) and sensorineural-hearing-loss (SNHL) listeners. To ensure listeners utilize the primary cues of Tone perception, e.g. F0 contour, acoustic cues of mean F0 and durations were controlled for the speech stimuli. The result showed that benefit from Tone contrast existed for NH listeners, but was weak for SNHL listeners. Further analysis based on the measurement of Tone contrast suggested that F0 contour contrast and temporal envelope contrast were both highly correlated with identification performance for each of the listener groups. However, the importance of F0 contour was bigger than that of temporal envelope, especially for NH listeners. These findings would have implications for developing speech processing strategies for Mandarin-native SNHL listeners.