The Benefits of Residual Hair Cell Function for Speech and Music Perception in Pediatric Bimodal Cochlear Implant Listeners

Objective. The aim of this study was to investigate the benefits of residual hair cell function for speech and music perception in bimodal pediatric Mandarin-speaking cochlear implant (CI) listeners. Design. Speech and music performance was measured in 35 Mandarin-speaking pediatric CI users for unilateral (CI-only) and bimodal listening. Mandarin speech perception was measured for vowels, consonants, lexical tones, and sentences in quiet. Music perception was measured for melodic contour identification (MCI). Results. Combined electric and acoustic hearing significantly improved MCI and Mandarin tone recognition performance, relative to CI-only performance. For MCI, performance was significantly better with bimodal listening for all semitone spacing conditions ( in all cases). For tone recognition, bimodal performance was significantly better only for tone 2 (rising; ). There were no significant differences between CI-only and CI