Cochlear implant perception of prosody is especially vulnerable to noise

Perceiving prosody is essential for understanding a talker’s intended meaning. For listeners with typical hearing (TH), the perception of voice pitch can withstand a high amount of background noise. However, listeners with cochlear implants (CI) lack access to harmonic pitch perception, putting them at risk for poor perception of prosody when noise is present, even if they appear to perceive pitch adequately in quiet. The current study tested the hypothesis that prosodic focus would be more heavily affected by noise for CI users compared to listeners with typical hearing. Stimuli were sentences with a contrastive focus on a specific word as if to correct prior information. The sentences were embedded in various levels of speech-shaped noise and presented with accompanying text to test only prosody rather than word identification ability. Participants used a visual analog scale to report the perceived degree of focus on words in each sentence. Results from TH listeners were essentially unaffected by noise regardless of the noise level (even down to −5 dB SNR). Conversely, CI users showed a high probability of misinterpreting which word was emphasized in sentences with any background noise, even with a favorable SNR of +10 dB, compared to their performance in quiet.