Fundamental frequency and perceptual adaptation to gender and emotion

Abstract

Previous work has documented perceptual adaptation to nonlinguistic properties in speech using voice gender and emotion categories. Exposure to voice gender and expressive speech adaptors produced a response shift away from the adaptation category. This project extends those findings by examining the contribution of fundamental frequency (F0) to perceptual speech aftereffects following adaptation to VCV syllables. Voice recordings from six speakers were processed using the STRAIGHT vocoder and an auditory morphing technique to synthesize gender (experiment 1) and expressive (experiment 2) speech sound continua ranging from one category endpoint to the other (female to male; angry to happy). Continuum endpoints served as adaptors for F0 present and F0 removed conditions. F0 removed stimuli were created by replacing the periodic excitation source with broadband noise. Aftereffects were found only in the F0 present condition, resulting in a decreased likelihood to identify test stimuli as part of the adaptation category. Aftereffects did not appear when F0 was removed. The findings highlight the important role F0 plays in perceptual adaptation to gender and expressive properties of speech, and further identifies a common acoustic basis for speech adaptation among several different classes of stimuli.