Differential effects of pitch on perceived duration in linguistic and auditory tasks

Abstract

Duration perception is a complex phenomenon in linguistic studies. While it can be instrumentally measured in a straightforward fashion, its relationship to other acoustic measurements is still not well understood. Previous work has found that duration can influence the perception of other acoustic cues, such as pitch (Brigner, 1988). This implies that it is important to go beyond isolated analysis of individual acoustic cues, and consider the synergistic effects of multiple acoustic cues. This paper presents the results of an experiment designed to test the influence of changing pitch on duration in two tasks, one using linguistic stimuli and one using acoustic stimuli. I find an effect of pitch on duration perception in both tasks. However, the results are not identical. In the auditory task, there was a small effect where higher tones were heard as longer than low tones. However, in the linguistic task, higher tones were heard as shorter. This indicates that pitch can have both a direct and indirect effect on duration perception and that there are complex interactions that may have a significant impact on our language perception.