In Brief:
Thirteen bimodal and 13 bilateral adult cochlear implant users were evaluated on tasks requiring good pitch perception: speech recognition with a competing talker, music perception, affective prosody discrimination, and talker identification. No significant differences were found between the mean scores of the bimodal and bilateral groups, although the bimodal group mostly scored better. Performance on the tasks was not correlated, suggesting that they were not providing a simple measure of pitch ability, but rather reflected more diverse real-world skills. This adds to existing speech perception, language, and localization studies showing no significant performance difference between bimodal and bilateral implant users.
