A relationship between auditory perception of speech and music for English speakers with hearing loss has been found in previous studies. When they more accurately discriminated stress and accent patterns in English, they also had better musical rhythm perception. However, people who speak a different language from English may show dissimilar results. The purpose of this study was to find out if performance on the melodic and rhythmic tests of the Primary Measures of Music Audiation (PMMA) were significantly and positively related to performance of the Mandarin Chinese tonal test in the Mandarin Lexical Neighborhood Test (M-LNT). Twenty-six Taiwanese children between the ages of 10 to 12 participated in this study. All of them were wearing cochlear implants due to their hearing loss. During this study, each participant took three auditory tests, which were the melodic, rhythmic and Mandarin Chinese tonal tests.;The results showed that in these Taiwanese participants, when they more accurately discriminated either the melodies or the rhythms on the PMMA, they also recognized Mandarin Chinese tones in M-LNT better. Furthermore, the performance of the melodic auditory perception on the PMMA significantly predicted the performance on the Mandarin Chinese tonal recognition in the M-LNT. Gender difference in this study was not a significant factor. These findings support the importance of melodic and rhythmic auditory training for Mandarin Chinese tonal discrimination and speech and language learning.
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