Perceptual judgment of voice pitch during pitch-matching tasks.

Abstract

This study investigated the perceptual judgment of voice pitch. 24 individuals were assigned to two groups to assess whether there is a difference in perceptual judgment of voice pitch during pitch-matching tasks. Group I, Naïve listeners, had no previous experience in anatomy, physiology, or voice pitch-evaluation methods. Group II, Experienced listeners, were master's level speech-language pathologists having completed academic training in evaluation of voice. Both groups listened to identical stimuli, which required matching audiotaped voice-pitch samples of a male and female voice to a note on an electronic keyboard. The experiment included two tasks. The first task assessed pitch range, which required matching of the lowest and highest voice pitch of both a male and female speaker singing /a/ to a note on a keyboard. The second task assessed habitual pitch, which required matching of the voice pitch of a word spoken by a male and female speaker to a note on a keyboard. A one-way analysis of variance indicated a significant difference between groups occurred for only one of four conditions measured, perceptual judgment of the female pitch range. No differences between groups were found in the perceptual judgments of the male pitch range or during perceptual judgment of the female or male habitual pitch, suggesting that the skill possessed by speech-language pathology students is no different from that of inexperienced listeners.