Perception of pitch and prominence in a speech context

Abstract

Different researchers have proposed a dominance region that refers to the band of harmonics whose frequencies determine the perceived pitch. This work examined the different cues appearing in the dominance region in order to discriminate the pitch and the prominence in a speech context. It has been done as a reiterant speech task. Native Spanish speakers were instructed to imitate the intonation and prominence perceived in the stimuli presented. The stimuli were composed by trisyllabic words of the form CV1CV2CV2, where C was the voiced lateral /l/, V1 = /a/, and V2 the five vowels of Spanish /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/. The degree of prominence was varied from the first to the last syllable, and the final tone. The stimuli were passband filtered between 250 and 900 Hz, their harmonics extracted and synthesized in three ways: (a) The unresolved harmonic more close to 600 Hz; (b) The three resolved harmonics around 600 Hz; and (c) The two resolved harmonics with larger amplitud by phonetic segment, next to the vowel formant. Results indicate that the stimuli (c) described above presents a better relationship between pitch and prominence discrimination.