Abstract
We investigated categorical perception of rising and falling pitch contours by tonal and non-tonal listeners. Specifically, we determined minimum durations needed to perceive both contours and compared to those of production, how stimuli duration affects their perception, whether there is an intrinsic F0 effect, and how first language background, duration, directions of pitch and vowel quality interact with each other. Continua of fundamental frequency on different vowels with 9 duration values were created for identification and discrimination tasks. Less time is generally needed to effectively perceive a pitch direction than to produce it. Overall, tonal listeners’ perception is more categorical than non-tonal listeners. Stimuli duration plays a critical role for both groups, but tonal listeners showed a stronger duration effect, and may benefit more from the extra time in longer stimuli for context-coding, consistent with the multistore model of categorical perception. Within a certain range of semitones, tonal listeners also required shorter stimulus duration to perceive pitch direction changes than non-tonal listeners. Finally, vowel quality plays a limited role and only interacts with duration in perceiving falling pitch directions. These findings further our understanding on models of categorical perception, the relationship between speech perception and production, and the interaction between the perception of tones and vowel quality.
Highlights
Voice pitch or rate of vocal fold vibration plays distinctive linguistic roles across languages
In addition to analyzing these characteristics, we examined whether linguistic backgrounds, pitch directions, vowel quality and duration may contribute to pitch categorization
When the two language groups were compared, contrary to what’s found in [5] that native Chinese speakers were surprisingly slower in produce a pitch direction change than native English speakers, we found that the minimum duration needed to perceive a change of 1st is longer for English listeners than for Mandarin listeners
Summary
Voice pitch or rate of vocal fold vibration (fundamental frequency, F0) plays distinctive linguistic roles across languages. In tonal languages such as Thai, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and Vietnamese, altering the pitch level or pitch contour on a syllable or a word results in a change in its meaning or referent. Mandarin speakers could not know the meaning of the syllable [ma] when uttered in isolation without processing its associated pitch variation. In a non-tonal language such as English, F0 variation functions at the phrase or the sentence level to signal differences such as a statement versus a question.
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