Objective: To assess the rhythmic and timbral perception ability in musical activities for postlingually deafened adult cochlear implant users.
Methods: Twelve normal-hearing and 12 adult cochlear implant users were recruited in this study. Rhythm discrimination, instrument identification, and instrument number detection measurements in Musical Sounds in Cochlear Implants (MuSIC) test battery were used to assess the rhythmic and timbral perception ability for both normal-hearing and cochlear implant users.
Results: Cochlear implant subjects achieved 84.4% correct in rhythm discrimination test on average, which was not significantly different from the performance of normal-hearing subjects (85.1%) (t = 0.116, P > 0.05). The average score of instrument identification and instrument number detection test for cochlear implant subjects were 72.3% and 39.2%, respectively. The performance of cochlear implant subjects in both of two tests were significantly poorer than those of normal-hearing subjects with 88.3% and 73.5% correct, respectively (t = 2.498 and 4.673, P < 0.05).
Conclusion: Postlingually deafened cochlear implant subjects, on average, performed significantly poorer in timbral perception tasks relative to normal hearing subjects, while close to the ability of normal hearing subjects in rhythmic perception.