The effect of prosodic structure on cue integration in pitch perception

Abstract

Listeners integrate voice quality cues when perceiving pitch, and listeners’ pitch perception strategy is modulated by their musicality. Prior work has shown that speakers of English, Mandarin and Cantonese performed similarly on stimuli based on English prosody (pitch contour being driven by stress), but it remains unknown whether the prosodic structure of the stimuli affects pitch perception. 47 L1-English and 95 L1-Cantonese speakers participated in a pitch classification experiment. The stimuli included two F0 peaks modelled after Cantonese prosody (pitch movement being mostly modulated by tones), they were resynthesized to contrasting in two spectral slopes creating four permutations. The first peak had a consistent F0, while the second peak varied in F0 along an 11-step continuum. Listeners judged whether the second ‘ma4-ma1-ma4’ was higher in F0 than the first word. Listeners also completed a musicality test. Results show that all participants integrated spectral cues in pitch perception similarly with breathier-tenser stimuli favoring hearing a higher pitch and vice versa, and individuals with high musicality integrate spectral cues less. However, the effect of musicality was significantly smaller for Cantonese than for English speakers, differing from stimuli modelled after English prosody. Overall results suggest an effect of prosody on speakers’ pitch perception.