Changes In Pitch Contour Research Articles

Perceptual Asymmetries and Auditory Processing of Estonian Quantities.

Similar to visual perception, auditory perception also has a clearly described “pop-out” effect, where an element with some extra feature is easier to detect among elements without an extra feature. This phenomenon is better known as auditory perceptual asymmetry. We investigated such asymmetry between shorter or longer duration, and level or falling of pitch of linguistic stimuli that carry a meaning in one language (Estonian), but not in another (Russian). For the mismatch negativity (MMN) experiment, we created four different types of stimuli by modifying the duration of the first vowel [ɑ] (170, 290 ms) and pitch contour (level vs. falling pitch) of the stimuli words (‘SATA,’ ‘SAKI’). The stimuli were synthesized from Estonian words (‘SATA,’ ‘SAKI’) and follow the Estonian language three-way quantity system, which incorporates tonal features (falling pitch contour) together with temporal patterns. This made the meaning of the word dependent on the combination of both features and allows us to compare the relative contribution of duration and pitch contour in discrimination of language stimuli in the brain via MMN generation. The participants of the experiment were 12 Russian native speakers with little or no experience in Estonian and living in Estonia short-term, and 12 Estonian native speakers (age 18–27 years). We found that participants’ perception of the linguistic stimuli differed not only according to the physical features but also according to their native language, confirming that the meaning of the word interferes with the early automatic processing of phonological features. The GAMM and ANOVA analysis of the reversed design results showed that the deviant with longer duration among shorter standards elicited a MMN response with greater amplitude than the short deviant among long standards, while changes in pitch contour (falling vs. level pitch) produced neither strong MMN nor asymmetry. Thus, we demonstrate the effect of language background on asymmetric perception of linguistic stimuli that aligns with those of previous studies (Jaramillo et al., 2000), and contributes to the growing body of knowledge supporting auditory perceptual asymmetry.

Embodying melody through a conducting baton: a pilot comparison between musicians and non-musicians.

Finger-tapping tasks have been widely adopted to investigate auditory-motor synchronization, i.e., the coupling of movement with an external auditory rhythm. However, the discrete nature of these movements usually limits their application to the study of beat perception in the context of isochronous rhythms. The purpose of the present pilot study was to test an innovative task that allows investigating bodily responses to complex, non-isochronous rhythms. A conductor's baton was provided to 16 healthy subjects, divided into 2 different groups depending on the years of musical training they had received (musicians or non-musicians). Ad hoc-created melodies, including notes of different durations, were played to the subjects. Each subject was asked to move the baton up and down according to the changes in pitch contour. Software for video analysis and modelling (Tracker®) was used to track the movement of the baton tip. The main parameters used for the analysis were the velocity peaks in the vertical axis. In the musician group, the number of velocity peaks exactly matched the number of notes, while in the non-musician group, the number of velocity peaks exceeded the number of notes. An exploratory data analysis using Poincaré plots suggested a greater degree of coupling between hand-arm movements and melody in musicians both with isochronous and non-isochronous rhythms. The calculated root mean square error (RMSE) between the note onset times and the velocity peaks, and the analysis of the distribution of velocity peaks in relationship to note onset times confirmed the effect of musical training. Notwithstanding the small number of participants, these results suggest that this novel behavioural task could be used to investigate auditory-motor coupling in the context of music in an ecologically valid setting. Furthermore, the task may be used for rhythm training and rehabilitation in neurological patients with movement disorders.

Syllabic tone articulation influences the identification and use of words during Chinese sentence reading: Evidence from ERP and eye movement recordings.

In two experiments, we examined the contribution of articulation-specific features to visual word recognition during the reading of Chinese. In spoken Standard Chinese, a syllable with a full tone can be tone-neutralized through sound weakening and pitch contour change, and there are two types of two-character compound words with respect to their articulation variation. One type requires articulation of a full tone for each constituent character, and the other requires a full- and a neutral-tone articulation for the first and second characters, respectively. Words of these two types with identical first characters were selected and embedded in sentences. Native speakers of Standard Chinese were recruited to read the sentences. In Experiment 1, the individual words of a sentence were presented serially at a fixed pace while event-related potentials were recorded. This resulted in less-negative N100 and anterior N250 amplitudes and in more-negative N400 amplitudes when targets contained a neutral tone. Complete sentences were visible in Experiment 2, and eye movements were recorded while participants read. Analyses of oculomotor activity revealed shorter viewing durations and fewer refixations on-and fewer regressive saccades to-target words when their second syllable was articulated with a neutral rather than a full tone. Together, the results indicate that readers represent articulation-specific word properties, that these representations are routinely activated early during the silent reading of Chinese sentences, and that the representations are also used during later stages of word processing.

Just-noticeable difference of tone pitch contour change for Mandarin congenital amusics.

Congenital amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder that may affect the processing of both music pitch and lexical tone. In the present study, the just-noticeable differences (JNDs) of tone pitch contour change were examined for three groups of Mandarin-native listeners: amusics with (tone agnosics) and without lexical tone difficulties (pure amusics), and matched controls. Tone agnosics showed significantly larger JNDs than normal controls, while pure amusics performed comparably with the controls. These results suggest that only those amusics with behavioral lexical tone deficits might be psychophysically impaired in pitch contour discrimination.

Melodic pitch perception and lexical tone perception in Mandarin-speaking cochlear implant users.

To examine the relationship between lexical tone perception and melodic pitch perception in Mandarin-speaking cochlear implant (CI) users and to investigate the influence of previous acoustic hearing on CI users' speech and music perception. Lexical tone perception and melodic contour identification (MCI) were measured in 21 prelingual and 11 postlingual young (aged 6-26 years) Mandarin-speaking CI users. Lexical tone recognition was measured for four tonal patterns: tone 1 (flat F0), tone 2 (rising F0), tone 3 (falling-rising F0), and tone 4 (falling F0). MCI was measured using nine five-note melodic patterns that contained changes in pitch contour, as well as different semitone spacing between notes. Lexical tone recognition was generally good (overall mean = 81% correct), and there was no significant difference between subject groups. MCI performance was generally poor (mean = 23% correct). MCI performance was significantly better for postlingual (mean = 32% correct) than for prelingual CI participants (mean = 18% correct). After correcting for outliers, there was no significant correlation between lexical tone recognition and MCI performance for prelingual or postlingual CI participants. Age at deafness was significantly correlated with MCI performance only for postlingual participants. CI experience was significantly correlated with MCI performance for both prelingual and postlingual participants. Duration of deafness was significantly correlated with tone recognition only for prelingual participants. Despite the prevalence of pitch cues in Mandarin, the present CI participants had great difficulty perceiving melodic pitch. The availability of amplitude and duration cues in lexical tones most likely compensated for the poor pitch perception observed with these CI listeners. Previous acoustic hearing experience seemed to benefit postlingual CI users' melodic pitch perception. Longer CI experience was associated with better MCI performance for both subject groups, suggesting that CI users' music perception may improve as they gain experience with their device.

Just noticeable difference of tone pitch contour change for English- and Chinese-native listeners

Just noticeable differences of tone pitch contour discrimination were examined for young English- and Mandarin Chinese-native listeners to examine categorical features of tone perception for the two groups of listeners. Three types of stimuli were used: A Mandarin Chinese vowel, an English vowel, and tonal glides. Level, rising, and falling tones within or across tone boundaries served as the standard stimuli to measure thresholds of tone pitch discrimination. Performance was equivalent between English- and Chinese-native listeners for level tones, but significantly differed for rising and falling tones, regardless of the type of stimuli. English listeners showed significantly lower thresholds at the offset of F0 shifts than Chinese listeners, while Chinese listeners discriminated tone pitch changes at the onset with significantly lower thresholds than their English peers. These psychophysical results, combined with tone perception reported in other studies, indicated that Mandarin-native listeners perceived lexical tones in a categorical manner, based on their lexical tone experience, whereas English-native listeners perceived tones on a psychophysical base.

Three perspectives on non-uniform linguistic attainment

D^hrowska's target article comes at a time when the study of individual diflerences is a more prominent thing than ever in both native and non-native language studies. For example, the cover of the most recent research report of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics proclaims: differences are a hallmark of our language faculty, and an upcoming issue of Language Learning is devoted to individual differences in second language learning. The variable of literacy, which D^browska considers a key element of a range of language-experiential influences on grammar development and language processing, is receiving renewed attention. For example, Huettig, Singh and Mishra (2011) find that high-literate Indian participants are faster than low-literates in directing their gaze to images of objects referenced in spoken sentences. Highliterates may be better able than low-literates to use grammatical and semantic information from sentence context to predict upcoming words. The skills that might underlie language development — and individual differences in the trainability of such skills — are actively investigated these days as well. Chandrasekaran et al. (2010), looking at the L2 acquisition of Mandarin pitch tone, found that individuals who were successful in the task attended to the direction of pitch contour change, and were also more trainable in pitch direction detection than less successful participants. Individual differences in the acquisition of L2 linguistic tones appear to be related to superior neural representation of pitch patterns in the inferior colliculus (Chandrasekaran et al., 2011). ^ Of course, inter-individual variability in language skills, academic achievement, intelligence, trainability, and literacy has not been ignored over the years. With respect to the literacy factor, for example, Fletcher (1981) showed in a picture

ERP correlates of pre-attentive processing of Cantonese lexical tones: The effects of pitch contour and pitch height

The pre-attentive processing of Cantonese tones was studied with an auditory passive oddball paradigm. Event-related potentials to standard and deviant auditory stimuli were recorded as participants watched a silent movie attentively. The standards and deviants differed in either pitch level or pitch contour. Mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a were elicited by all types of deviant tones, suggesting that lexical tone was processed pre-attentively. In addition, the size and latency of MMN were sensitive to the size of pitch level change, while the latency of P3a captured the presence of pitch contour change. These results indicate that pitch contour and pitch height are two important dimensions in sensory processing of lexical tones.

On the perception of tones in Fuzhou.

The Fuzhou dialect of Chinese has seven citation tones. Three of these tones are considered phonologically level. An acoustic quantification revealed consistent changes in pitch contour in addition to pitch height for these tones, with the highest tone rising slightly and the lower two tones dropping slightly. Moreover a non‐modal phonation was found to occur consistently with the lowest of these “level” tones. This study focuses on the role of pitch height versus contour and phonation as relevant for tonal identification. Actual tokens were altered to modify the pitch height of these tones, maintaining their inherent contours and phonation. Native speakers were then asked to identify the “word” that they heard (from a list). The results show that both contour and phonation, in addition to pitch height, play a role in tonal perception.

Phonological knowledge guides 2-year-olds’ and adults’ interpretation of salient pitch contours in word learning

Phonology provides a system by which a limited number of types of phonetic variation can signal communicative intentions at multiple levels of linguistic analysis. Because phonologies vary from language to language, acquiring the phonology of a language demands learning to attribute phonetic variation appropriately. Here, we studied the case of pitch-contour variation. In English, pitch contour does not differentiate words, but serves other functions, like marking yes/no questions and conveying emotions. We show that, in accordance with their phonology, English-speaking adults and 2-year-olds do not interpret salient pitch contours as inherent to novel words. We taught participants a new word with consistent segmental and pitch characteristics, and then tested word recognition for trained and deviant pronunciations using an eyegaze-based procedure. Vowel-quality mispronunciations impaired recognition, but large changes in pitch contour did not. By age 2, children already apply their knowledge of English phonology to interpret phonetic consistencies in their experience with words.

Speech perception in early infancy: Discrimination of speech-sound categories

The sucking-habituation technique was used to test 4- to 16-week old infants' tendencies to discriminate changes in formant frequency (synthetic /a/ vs /i/) in the presence of irrelevant variation in the pitch contour of the stimuli, and their tendencies to discriminate changes in pitch contour (steady vs rise-fall) in the presence of irrelevant variation in the formant frequencies of the stimuli. Analysis of the sucking rates for the 2 min preceding and the 2 min immediately following the fulfillment of the habituation criteria for experimental (stimulus change) and control (no stimulus change) infants demonstrated discrimination of formant changes regardless of the presence or absence of irrelevant variation in the pitch contour of the vowel. While infants demonstrated discrimination of the pitch-contour change in the absence of an irrelevant change in the vowel, they did not discriminate the pitch change in the presence of an irrelevant change in the vowel. It took longer for infants to meet sucking-habituation criteria when an irrelevant dimension was varied. Infants ran as “silent controls” produced fewer high-amplitude sucks than infants for whom sound presentation was contingent on high-amplitude sucking [Supported by NIH Grant NS 03856 to CID.]