Perception Of Intonation Research Articles

Perception of melodic intonation in performances with and without vibrato

We compared perception of mistuned intervals in unaccompanied melodies performed by trumpet, violin, and voice, and examined whether there were differences between the three timbres in performances with and without vibrato. Participants were 144 university music students. Listeners heard the three unaccompanied solo performers in two vibrato conditions (with and without vibrato), and three intonation conditions (selected melodic intervals were in tune, sharp 25 cents, or flat 25 cents relative to equal temperament). All three stimuli were perceived as more out of tune when there was no vibrato compared to vibrato. In performances without vibrato, violin was judged as more out of tune than voice and trumpet across all three tuning conditions. Melodies performed with vibrato were judged differently: Violin was judged as least in tune for intervals mistuned in the flat direction, trumpet was heard as least in tune for intervals mistuned sharp, and voice was judged least in tune when intervals were in tune (relative to equal temperament). Differences in perception between timbres may be influenced by characteristics of the vibrato itself such as modulation width, rate, and type.

Recognizing the authenticity of emotional expressions: F0 contour matters when you need to know

Authenticity of vocal emotion expression affects emotion recognition and brain activity in the so-called Theory of Mind (ToM) network, which is implied in the ability to explain and predict behavior by attributing mental states to other individuals. Exploiting the variability of the fundamental frequency (F0 contour), which varies more (higher contour) in play-acted expressions than authentic ones, we examined whether contour biases explicit categorization toward a particular authenticity or emotion category. Moreover, we tested whether contour modulates blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) response in the ToM network and explored the role of task as a top-down modulator. The effects of contour on BOLD signal were analyzed by contrasting high and low contour stimuli within two previous fMRI studies that implemented emotion and authenticity rating tasks. Participants preferentially categorized higher contour stimuli as play-acted and lower contour stimuli as sad. Higher contour was found to up-regulate activation task-independently in the primary auditory cortex. Stimulus contour and task were found to interact in a network including medial prefrontal cortex, with an increase in BOLD signal for low-contour stimuli during explicit perception of authenticity and an increase for high-contour stimuli during explicit perception of emotion. Contour-induced BOLD effects appear to be purely stimulus-driven in early auditory and intonation perception, while being strongly task-dependent in regions involved in higher cognition.

The perception of stress and intonation in children with a cochlear implant and a hearing aid

ObjectivesThis study investigated whether low frequency information from a hearing aid improved the perception of stress and intonation by English-speaking children with cochlear implants. As pitch information is limited for cochlear implant users, this study also investigated if users rely more on the cues of duration and amplitude to perceive stress and intonation.MethodsNine children with bimodal stimulation (cochlear implant and hearing aid) participated in two experiments. The first measured the just audible change in F0 (pitch) and amplitude for a speech-like word ‘baba’. The second experiment examined the children's ability to identify focus in natural and manipulated sentences.ResultsOverall, group results did not show a bimodal advantage in perceiving stress and intonation. However, the children were significantly better at perceiving focus in sentences with natural speech compared with manipulated speech in both the CI and bimodal conditions. The results suggest that in the absence of pitch cues, amplitude and duration cues are used to perceive stress and intonation. However, the majority of children only perceived amplitude changes greater than the changes typically found in speech, implying duration cues were the most valuable.DiscussionTaken together the findings suggest that for children with cochlear implants, cues to F0 may not be essential for prosody perception and in the absence of cues to F0 and amplitude, duration may offer an alternative cue.ConclusionAlthough a bimodal advantage was not demonstrated for all participants, it is recommended that if clinically appropriate, a contralateral hearing aid is fitted and trialled to exploit any residual hearing.

Assessing language acquisition from parent-child interaction: An event-related potential study on perception of intonation contours in infancy

The aim of this paper is to present our multidisciplinary project to study parent-child interaction. The goal of the project is to identify, test, and simulate components of child and adult speech and gestures and the consequences they might have on child language acquisition. Since typical parent-child interaction is built upon both interlocutors’ intention-reading, responsiveness to joint-attention, and imitation of speech/gestures, we make video recordings along with recordings of speech data to grasp the integration of semantic and pragmatic aspects of language acquisition. The understanding of parent-child interaction benefits further from information on brain activation involved in speech processing. As a first step to achieve the project goals, an electroencephalography/event-related potential (EEG/ERP) study exploring children’s early perception of intonation contours involved in human interactions was performed. This paper discusses the characteristics of integration of multimodal social-emotional (speech, prosody, faces, posture) signals as part of the dynamics of communication in typically developing children. Possible application fields are social signal processing (SSP; an emerging research domain that aims to provide computers ability to understand human social signals), and improvement of diagnosis of late or atypical language development in pathologies that affect the dynamics of social interaction (such as autism spectrum disorders).

Infants' Perception of Intonation: Is It a Statement or a Question?

The ability to distinguish phonetic variations in speech that are relevant to meaning is essential for infants' language development. Previous studies into the acquisition of prosodic categories have focused on lexical stress, lexical pitch accent, or lexical tone. However, very little is known about the developmental course of infants' perception of linguistic intonation. In this study, we investigate infants' perception of the correlates of the statement/yes–no question contrast in a language that marks this sentence type distinction only by prosodic means,EuropeanPortuguese (EP). Using a modified version of the visual habituation paradigm,EP‐learning infants at 5–6 and 8–9 months were able to successfully discriminate segmentally varied, single‐prosodic word intonational phrases presented with statement or yes–no question intonation, demonstrating that they are sensitive to the prosodic cues marking this distinction as early as 5 months and maintain this sensitivity throughout the first year. These results suggest the presence of precocious discrimination abilities for intonation across segmental variation, similarly to previous reports for lexical pitch accent, but unlike previous findings for word stress.

STEROWANA OCENA PROGÓW PSYCHOFIZYCZNYCH

ObjectiveThe estimation of perceptive thresholds is a basic element of psychoacoustics. One of the drawbacks of commonly used adaptive algorithms is the lack of reliability when the behavioral response is not robust. To address this issue an adaptive algorithm, TEMA (Threshold Estimation by Managed Algorithm), has been developed.DesignTEMA seeks the 50% point on the psychometric curve based on an up-down staircase procedure. Internal controls and stochastic processes aim at enhancing the reliability. The development of TEMA is described, together with its validations with reference to common adaptive procedures. Both Monte Carlo simulations and real subject testing were performed to assess the psychoacoustic threshold in intonation perception tests and the number of stimulus presentations needed.Study sampleA total of 29 adult listeners participated in the within-subjects comparison; 19 listeners had normal-hearing, the other 10 were hearing impaired (5 aided, 5 unaided).ResultsThe results show that TEMA outperformed commonly used algorithms in non-robust responders, with a minimal cost in terms of test duration.ConclusionsTEMA’s adaptive algorithm was shown to be significantly more resistant to gambling or cheating behavior and threshold drift than traditional, reversal-based algorithms. TEMA increases the accuracy of threshold estimation and the test reliability in non-robust responders. This makes TEMA applicable for automated threshold measurements in clinical settings.

The discrimination of intonational contours in Broca’s aphasia

The observation has been made that agrammatic speakers fail in the comprehension of various sentence types, and this behaviour has been attributed to diminished syntactic capabilities, under the unverified assumption that perception of intonation is intact. Here we re-examine this assumption experimentally with a language, Catalan, which allows for intonation to be the only variable over four sentence types (declaratives, yes-no questions, topicalisations and contrastive focus constructions). We conducted a discrimination task with 10 agrammatic and 10 age- and education-matched control subjects. The subjects were asked to decide whether sentence pairs were identical or not. The overall agrammatic performance was very accurate (89.1% versus 95.6% correct of the controls). The aphasic participants performed above chance in six out of seven conditions. The results indicate that agrammatic individuals succeeded in the task and that their perception of intonation is spared. We conclude that failure in comprehension in agrammatism cannot be attributed to prosodic disruption.

Intonation perception in English: Effects of stimulus amplitude and listeners’ language background

The contour of fundamental frequency (F0) of the final word is the primary acoustic cue for intonation production and perception in English utterances. On the other hand, speakers of Mandarin Chinese may have to use other acoustic cues such as amplitude and duration rather than F0 contours to differentiate intonation contrasts since F0 contours carry lexical meaning in Mandarin Chinese. The goal of this study was to examine the role of the final word amplitude in intonation perception of English sentences. The final word amplitude was manipulated at three levels relative to the carrier sentence: −6, 0, and +6 dB. F0 contours of the final word were controlled continuously from falling to rising patterns. Listeners’ task was to identify the sentence intonation: question or statement. Preliminary results showed the intonation boundary shifted from slightly falling F0 contours to slightly rising F0 contours as the final word amplitude decreased for Chinese listeners, but the boundary did not change for the three amplitudes for English listeners. These results imply that Chinese listeners may use the final word amplitude as a secondary cue to perceive intonation contrasts in English, while English listeners may primarily rely on F0 contours for intonation perception.

Speech Intonation and Melodic Contour Recognition in Children With Cochlear Implants and With Normal Hearing

Cochlear implant (CI) users have difficulty perceiving some intonation cues in speech and melodic contours because of poor frequency selectivity in the cochlear implant signal. To assess perceptual accuracy of normal hearing (NH) children and pediatric CI users on speech intonation (prosody), melodic contour, and pitch ranking, and to determine potential predictors of outcomes. Does perceptual accuracy for speech intonation or melodic contour differ as a function of auditory status (NH, CI), perceptual category (falling versus rising intonation/contour), pitch perception, or individual differences (e.g., age, hearing history)? NH and CI groups were tested on recognition of falling intonation/contour versus rising intonation/contour presented in both spoken and melodic (sung) conditions. Pitch ranking was also tested. Outcomes were correlated with variables of age, hearing history, HINT, and CNC scores. The CI group was significantly less accurate than the NH group in spoken (CI, M = 63.1%; NH, M = 82.1%) and melodic (CI, M = 61.6%; NH, M = 84.2%) conditions. The CI group was more accurate in recognizing rising contour in the melodic condition compared with rising intonation in the spoken condition. Pitch ranking was a significant predictor of outcome for both groups in falling intonation and rising melodic contour; age at testing and hearing history variables were not predictive of outcomes. Children with CIs were less accurate than NH children in perception of speech intonation, melodic contour, and pitch ranking. However, the larger pitch excursions of the melodic condition may assist in recognition of the rising inflection associated with the interrogative form.

Teaching Tone and Intonation With Microcomputers

Although research on the use and effectiveness of visual feedback for teaching tone and intonation began more than thirty years ago, the technology for signal analysis and pitch extraction using microcomputers has only recently become widely accessible and affordable. This paper 1) reviews the major pedagogical applications of acoustic phonetic research for teaching segmentals (individual sounds) and suprasegmentals (intonation, stress, rhythm); 2) summaries the hardware and software currently available for speech analysis on the Macintosh and IBM-PCs, and 3) discusses courseware features that should be included in implementing this new technology to help foreign language students improve their production and perception of tone and intonation.

Contraintes phonologiques de l'intonation de la phrase réinterprétées à la lumière des recherches récentes en neurophysiologie

Far from the Autosegmental-Metrical formalizations describing sentence intonation, the so-called Functional-Cognitive approach is based on the dynamic temporal aspects linked to the perception of sentence intonation by listeners in order to reconstitute the prosodic structure encoded by the speaker. This prosodic structure, a priori independent from the other structures organizing the sentence, is constrained by specific rules largely explained by recent neurocognitive research. This research suggests for example that cortex Delta waves synchronize stress (temporal) groups and that Theta waves are linked to the perception of syllables. This hypothesis gives a proper account of the specific constrains that govern the prosodic structure, such as the maximal number of syllables included in a stress group, stress clash, syntactic clash and eurhythmy. It may also explain the sequential, non-concurrently and simultaneous character of the various hierarchical structures that organize sentence units, informational, syntactic and prosodic, which have already been observed in spontaneous speech by C. Blanche-Benveniste.

At the Edge of Intonation: The Interplay of Utterance-Final F0 Movements and Voiceless Fricative Sounds

The paper is concerned with the ‘edge of intonation’ in a twofold sense. It focuses on utterance-final F0 movements and crosses the traditional segment-prosody divide by investigating the interplay of F0 and voiceless fricatives in speech production. An experiment was performed for German with four types of voiceless fricatives: /f/, /s/, /ʃ/ and /x/. They were elicited with scripted dialogues in the contexts of terminal falling statement and high rising question intonations. Acoustic analyses show that fricatives concluding the high rising question intonations had higher mean centres of gravity (CoGs), larger CoG ranges and higher noise energy levels than fricatives concluding the terminal falling statement intonations. The different spectral-energy patterns are suitable to induce percepts of a high ‘aperiodic pitch’ at the end of the questions and of a low ‘aperiodic pitch’ at the end of the statements. The results are discussed with regard to the possible existence of ‘segmental intonation’ and its implication for F0 truncation and the segment-prosody dichotomy, in which segments are the alleged troublemakers for the production and perception of intonation.

The Relationship between the Perception of Emotional Intonation of Speech in Conditions of Interference and the Acoustic Parameters of Speech Signals in Adults of Different Gender and Age

The characteristics of the recognition of emotional speech intonations of different types (positive, negative, neutral) on the background of noise interference were studied in healthy subjects (49 subjects, aged 20–79 years) in relation to gender and age, as well as the gender of the speakers. On the background of noise, recognition efficiency for the positive emotional intonation “joy” was found to decrease strongly as compared with other emotional intonations for listeners of all ages, while the “anger” intonation showed no change for listeners aged 65–79 years. High recognition efficiency was demonstrated for emotions in the speech of female speakers on the background of noise. The most important acoustic parameters of the signal for the perception of emotional prosody in the presence and absence of noise were identified for adult listeners of different gender and age.

High School String Players’ Perception of Violin, Trumpet, and Voice Intonation

We studied young string players’ perception of intonation in accompanied solo performances of trumpet, voice, and violin. We were interested in whether pitch deviations of equal magnitude in the three solo performances would be judged as equivalent in intonation. Listeners were 71 middle and high school string players who heard trumpet, voice, and violin performances of “Ave Maria” (Bach/Gounod) accompanied by piano. Pitch levels of the soloists were in-tune or became progressively more sharp or flat (by 10, 20, and 30 cents) relative to the accompaniment. Intonation changes in the sharp direction were judged as more out-of-tune for the violin than equivalent alterations of voice and trumpet. In flat direction changes, violin was also heard as slightly more out-of-tune than the other soloists for deviations of 30 cents, but was judged similar to the other two for deviations of 10 and 20 cents. Additional research is necessary to investigate whether this outcome was a result of these string players’ heightened sensitivity to string intonation.

Categorical perception of intonation contrasts: Effects of listeners’ language background

Intonation perception of English speech was examined for English- and Chinese-native listeners. F0 contour was manipulated from falling to rising patterns for the final words of three sentences. Listener's task was to identify and discriminate the intonation of each sentence (question versus statement). English and Chinese listeners had significant differences in the identification functions such as the categorical boundary and the slope. In the discrimination functions, Chinese listeners showed greater peakedness than English peers. The cross-linguistic differences in intonation perception were similar to the previous findings in perception of lexical tones, likely due to listeners' language background differences.

The mechanism of speech processing in congenital amusia: evidence from Mandarin speakers.

Congenital amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder of pitch perception that causes severe problems with music processing but only subtle difficulties in speech processing. This study investigated speech processing in a group of Mandarin speakers with congenital amusia. Thirteen Mandarin amusics and thirteen matched controls participated in a set of tone and intonation perception tasks and two pitch threshold tasks. Compared with controls, amusics showed impaired performance on word discrimination in natural speech and their gliding tone analogs. They also performed worse than controls on discriminating gliding tone sequences derived from statements and questions, and showed elevated thresholds for pitch change detection and pitch direction discrimination. However, they performed as well as controls on word identification, and on statement-question identification and discrimination in natural speech. Overall, tasks that involved multiple acoustic cues to communicative meaning were not impacted by amusia. Only when the tasks relied mainly on pitch sensitivity did amusics show impaired performance compared to controls. These findings help explain why amusia only affects speech processing in subtle ways. Further studies on a larger sample of Mandarin amusics and on amusics of other language backgrounds are needed to consolidate these results.

Perception of intonation in Mandarin Chinese

There is a tendency across languages to use a rising pitch contour to convey question intonation and a falling pitch contour to convey a statement. In a lexical tone language such as Mandarin Chinese, rising and falling pitch contours are also used to differentiate lexical meaning. How, then, does the multiplexing of the F(0) channel affect the perception of question and statement intonation in a lexical tone language? This study investigated the effects of lexical tones and focus on the perception of intonation in Mandarin Chinese. The results show that lexical tones and focus impact the perception of sentence intonation. Question intonation was easier for native speakers to identify on a sentence with a final falling tone and more difficult to identify on a sentence with a final rising tone, suggesting that tone identification intervenes in the mapping of F(0) contours to intonational categories and that tone and intonation interact at the phonological level. In contrast, there is no evidence that the interaction between focus and intonation goes beyond the psychoacoustic level. The results provide insights that will be useful for further research on tone and intonation interactions in both acoustic modeling studies and neurobiological studies.

Contribution of a Contralateral Hearing Aid to Perception of Consonant Voicing, Intonation, and Emotional State in Adult Cochlear Implantees

Binaural hearing in cochlear implant (CI) users can be achieved either by bilateral implantation or bimodally with a contralateral hearing aid (HA). Binaural-bimodal hearing has the advantage of complementing the high-frequency electric information from the CI by low-frequency acoustic information from the HA. We examined the contribution of a contralateral HA in 25 adult implantees to their perception of fundamental frequency-cued speech characteristics (initial consonant voicing, intonation, and emotions). Testing with CI alone, HA alone, and bimodal hearing showed that all three characteristics were best perceived under the bimodal condition. Significant differences were recorded between bimodal and HA conditions in the initial voicing test, between bimodal and CI conditions in the intonation test, and between both bimodal and CI conditions and between bimodal and HA conditions in the emotion-in-speech test. These findings confirmed that such binaural-bimodal hearing enhances perception of these speech characteristics and suggest that implantees with residual hearing in the contralateral ear may benefit from a HA in that ear.

The perception of intonation questions and statements in Cantonese

In tone languages there are potential conflicts in the perception of lexical tone and intonation, as both depend mainly on the differences in fundamental frequency (F0) patterns. The present study investigated the acoustic cues associated with the perception of sentences as questions or statements in Cantonese, as a function of the lexical tone in sentence final position. Cantonese listeners performed intonation identification tasks involving complete sentences, isolated final syllables, and sentences without the final syllable (carriers). Sensitivity (d' scores) were similar for complete sentences and final syllables but were significantly lower for carriers. Sensitivity was also affected by tone identity. These findings show that the perception of questions and statements relies primarily on the F0 characteristics of the final syllables (local F0 cues). A measure of response bias (c) provided evidence for a general bias toward the perception of statements. Logistic regression analyses showed that utterances were accurately classified as questions or statements by using average F0 and F0 interval. Average F0 of carriers (global F0 cue) was also found to be a reliable secondary cue. These findings suggest that the use of F0 cues for the perception of intonation question in tonal languages is likely to be language-specific.

Effects of Age on F0 Discrimination and Intonation Perception in Simulated Electric and Electroacoustic Hearing

Recent research suggests that older listeners may have difficulty processing information related to the fundamental frequency (F0) of voiced speech. In this study, the focus was on the mechanisms that may underlie this reduced ability. We examined whether increased age resulted in decreased ability to perceive F0 using fine-structure cues provided by the harmonic structure of voiced speech sounds or cues provided by high-rate envelope fluctuations (periodicity). Younger listeners with normal hearing and older listeners with normal to near-normal hearing completed two tasks of F0 perception. In the first task (steady state F0), the fundamental frequency difference limen (F0DL) was measured adaptively for synthetic vowel stimuli. In the second task (time-varying F0), listeners relied on variations in F0 to judge intonation of synthetic diphthongs. For both tasks, three processing conditions were created: eight-channel vocoding that preserved periodicity cues to F0; a simulated electroacoustic stimulation condition, which consisted of high-frequency vocoder processing combined with a low-pass-filtered portion, and offered both periodicity and fine-structure cues to F0; and an unprocessed condition. F0 difference limens for steady state vowel sounds and the ability to discern rising and falling intonations were significantly worse in the older subjects compared with the younger subjects. For both older and younger listeners, scores were lowest for the vocoded condition, and there was no difference in scores between the unprocessed and electroacoustic simulation conditions. Older listeners had difficulty using periodicity cues to obtain information related to talker fundamental frequency. However, performance was improved by combining periodicity cues with (low frequency) acoustic information, and that strategy should be considered in individuals who are appropriate candidates for such processing. For cochlear implant candidates, this effect might be achieved by partial electrode insertion providing acoustic stimulation in the low frequencies or by the combination of a traditional implant in one ear and a hearing aid in the opposite ear.