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This dissertation, The Influence of Tone and Consonants Perception on Sentence Perception in Mandarin-speaking Children With Prelingual Hearing-impairment by Shufeng, Zhu, 朱淑丰, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled The influence of tone and consonants perception on sentence perception in Mandarin-speaking children with prelingual hearing-impairment Submitted by Shufeng Zhu for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong in July 2015 In Chinese, a monosyllable consists of consonant, vowel and tone. For people with normal hearing, lexical tone and consonant play important roles in sentence perception, especially in challenging listening conditions. However, little is known about the tone, consonant and sentence perception ability in Mandarin-speaking children with prelingual hearing impairment (HI) and fitted with hearing aids (HAs). Moreover, it is uncertain how tone and consonant perception relate to sentence perception. In order to evaluate the influence of tone and consonant perception on sentence perception in children with HI and fitted with HAs, the present research program was initiated. Fifty children with NH aged 7 and 81 children with different level of HI aged from 5-12 participated in this study. In the first phase, due to the limited tone perception test materials in Mandarin for children, a standard Mandarin Tone Identification Test (MTIT) material was developed. Fifty-one monosyllables depicted using simple pictures were chosen. Each test stimuli set contained four words, with one target, one contrastive tone, and two unrelated distracters. The test targets were presented using recorded stimuli on custom software. Psychometric properties of the MTIT were evaluated, suggesting good reliability (test-retest reliability and international consistency reliability), validity (face, content, known-groups and concurrent validity) and sensitivity. In the second phase, tone, consonant and sentence perception tests were evaluated. Results showed that the Tone 2/Tone 3 contrast was difficult for children with various degrees of HI and in addition, the Tone 1/Tone 2 contrast was also difficult to identify by those with profound HI. The reason may due to that both tones 2 and 3 contours end with a rising F0 and tones 1 and 2 in the present study exhibited almost the same h h mean duration. While the /p /-/t /, /ts/-/tʂ/ and /ʐ/-/l/ were the most difficult consonant h h h h minimal pairs among all consonants; /p/-/p /, /t/-/t /, /tɕ/-/tɕ / and /k/-/k / were least difficult. The results consistent with previous studies in English and Cantonese that children with HI had difficulty with place of articulation while consonant pairs contrasted by aspiration were easy to discriminate by children with HI. The sentence performance decreased with the decreasing of the S/Ns and also decreased with the increasing of the HI level. The results also indicated that degree of HI significantly predicted tone, consonant and sentence perception both in quiet and in noise. Furthermore, tone identification and consonant discrimination contributed significantly to sentence perception both in quiet and in noise. In summary, tone and consonant correlated well with sentence perception, especially in noise. The present study has made a contribution to our understanding of tone, consonant, and sentence perception ability and their relationships in Mandarin-speaking children with HI and fitted with HAs. The research findings help researchers, clinicians and caregivers to gain a better und

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