Speaker normalization in perception of lexical tone

Abstract: Listeners’ decisions on vowel and consonant identity have been shown to depend upon inferences about the properties of the individual speech source, but little empirical attention has been given to (theoretically necessary) speaker-normalization in the recovery of linguistically significant pitch information from voice fundamental frequency (F0). In the investigation reported here, two sets of synthetic Mandarin tone stimuli, some with lexically ambiguous F0 contours, were embedded in natural speech utterances of two native speakers with different but overlapping voice ranges, and presented in a lexical identification test. While individual listeners differed somewhat in the acoustic criteria by which they apparently decided lexical identity, all listeners significantly assigned “ambiguous” stimuli with identical absolute F0 contours to different lexical categories depending on which of the speakers was heard to “produce” them. These results indicate that in the perceptual processing of F0, phonetic decisions are indeed referenced to an inferred scaling of the source voice range.

[1]  D. Stern,et al.  The prosody of maternal speech: infant age and context related changes , 1983, Journal of Child Language.

[2]  A. Fourcin.  Speech Perception in the Absence of Speech Productive Ability , 1975 .

[3]  Leo Loveday,et al.  Pitch, Politeness and Sexual Role: An Exploratory Investigation into the Pitch Correlates of English and Japanese Politeness Formulae , 1981 .

[4]  M A Just,et al.  Normalization of irrelevant dimensions in stimulus comparisons. , 1978, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[5]  Aichen T. Ho.  The Acoustic Variation of Mandarin Tones , 1976 .

[6]  André Rigault,et al.  Sources of Inter- and Intra-Speaker Variability in the Acoustic Properties of Speech Sounds , 1972 .

[7]  W. Jassem.  Normalization of F 0 Curves , 1975 .

[8]  John J. Dreher,et al.  Instrumental investigation of single and paired Mandarin tonemes , 1966 .

[9]  P. Lieberman.  ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF VOWEL PRODUCTION IN YOUNG CHILDREN , 1980 .

[10]  E Abberton,et al.  First applications of a new laryngograph. , 1971, Medical & biological illustration.

[11]  A Fourcin,et al.  Acoustic Patterns and Speech Acquisition , 1978 .

[12]  Adrian Fourcin,et al.  Perceptual Mechanisms at the First Level of Speech Processing , 1972 .

[13]  M. P. Haggard,et al.  Vocal Tract Normalisation as Demonstrated by Reaction Times , 1975 .

[14]  Sandra E. Trehub,et al.  Auditory Processing of Relational Information by Young Infants , 1977 .

[15]  William E. Cooper,et al.  Fundamental Frequency in Sentence Production , 1981 .

[16]  G. Bruce,et al.  Textual Aspects of Prosody in Swedish , 1982, Phonetica.

[17]  T. Ching.  Communication of lexical tone patterns in Cantonese. , 1981 .

[18]  T. C. Rand.  Vocal Tract Size Normalization in the Perception of Stop Consonants , 1971 .

[19]  Yuen-Yuen Fok Chan.  A perceptual study of tones in Cantonese , 1974 .

[20]  A. Fourcin,et al.  Speech source inference , 1968 .

[21]  D. Broadbent,et al.  Information Conveyed by Vowels , 1957 .