Purpose: Cochlear implant processors deliver mostly temporal envelope information and limited fundamental frequency (F0) information to the users, which make pitch and lexical tone perception challenging for cochlear implantees. Different factors have been found to affect Mandarin tone perception in temporal cues but the most effective temporal cues for lexical tone identification across different backgrounds remained unclear because no study has comprehensively examined the effects and interactions of these factors, particularly, in languages that use both pitch heights and pitch shapes to differentiate lexical meanings. The present study compared identification of Cantonese tones in naturally produced stimuli, and in three temporal cues, namely the amplitude contour cue (TE50), the periodicity cue (TE500), and the temporal fine structure cue (TFS), in three different numbers of frequency bands (B04, B08, B16) in quiet and two types of noise (two male talker-babble and speech-shaped noise).
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