{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,30]],"date-time":"2026-06-30T10:14:21Z","timestamp":1782814461357,"version":"3.54.5"},"reference-count":20,"publisher":"Acoustical Society of America (ASA)","issue":"5","funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/100000002","name":"National Institutes of Health","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["R01-004792"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["R01-004792"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100000002","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["81670923"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["81670923"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":["pubs.aip.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":[],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2018,5,1]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>Mandarin is a tonal language, and it is important to preserve lexical tone information in synthesized speech. With natural speech, Chinese cochlear implant (CI) users have difficulty perceiving voice pitch cues important for lexical tone perception; it is unclear whether this difficulty persists in Mandarin synthesized speech. In this study, intelligibility of naturally produced and synthesized Mandarin speech was measured in Chinese CI listeners; intelligibility was also measured in a control group of normal-hearing (NH) listeners. Five synthesized voices were selected to represent different talker genders (male, female, child), speaking rates (normal, slow), and speaking styles (emotional, accent). The data showed that while modern Mandarin text-to-speech (TTS) systems can provide perfect speech intelligibility for NH listeners, overall intelligibility was much poorer for CI than for NH listeners. CI performance was significantly poorer with synthesized speech than with natural speech (p\u2009&amp;lt;\u20090.001). CI listeners were highly sensitive to the \u201cextra-atypical\u201d synthesized emotional and accented speech. Performance with each of the synthesized speech types was significantly correlated with performance with natural speech in CI users (p\u2009&amp;lt;\u20090.01 in all cases). While modern TTS systems offer educational and communication benefits to CI users and hearing-impaired individuals, the selection of synthesized voices should be carefully considered in education applications of TTS for hearing-impaired individuals, especially CI children, since poor intelligibility performance may affect language learning.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1121\/1.5037590","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2018,5,15]],"date-time":"2018-05-15T20:05:09Z","timestamp":1526414709000},"page":"2886-2891","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1063\/aip-crossmark-policy-page","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":6,"title":["Intelligibility of naturally produced and synthesized Mandarin speech by cochlear implant listeners"],"prefix":"10.1121","volume":"143","author":[{"given":"Ying","family":"Shi","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Beijing TongRen Hospital, Capital Medical University 1 , Beijing 100730, People's Republic of China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Jingyuan","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Beijing TongRen Hospital, Capital Medical University 1 , Beijing 100730, People's Republic of China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Yue","family":"Gong","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Beijing TongRen Hospital, Capital Medical University 1 , Beijing 100730, People's Republic of China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Biao","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Beijing TongRen Hospital, Capital Medical University 1 , Beijing 100730, People's Republic of China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Yongxin","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Beijing TongRen Hospital, Capital Medical University 1 , Beijing 100730, People's Republic of China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"suffix":"III","given":"John J.","family":"Galvin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"House Ear Institute 2 , Los Angeles, California 90057, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Qian-Jie","family":"Fu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Head and Neck Surgery, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA 3 , Los Angeles, California 90095, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"231","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2018,5,15]]},"reference":[{"key":"2024031517273175500_c1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"453","DOI":"10.1016\/0167-6393(90)90021-Z","article-title":"Pitch-synchronous waveform processing techniques for text-to-speech synthesis using diphones","volume":"9","year":"1990","journal-title":"Speech Commun."},{"key":"2024031517273175500_c2","first-page":"563","article-title":"A corpus-based synthesizer","year":"1992"},{"key":"2024031517273175500_c3","volume-title":"From Text to Speech\u2013The MITalk System","year":"1987"},{"key":"2024031517273175500_c4","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"971","DOI":"10.1121\/1.383940","article-title":"Software for a cascade\/parallel formant synthesizer","volume":"67","year":"1980","journal-title":"J. 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