Nanette Veilleux, Jonathan Barnes, Alejna Brugos, & Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel. (2014) “Individual differences in the perception of fundamental frequency scaling in American English speech.” Poster presented at the 167th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Providence, May, 2014.
Abstract:
Although most participants (N = 62) in an F0 scaling experiment judged open syllables (day) as higher in pitch than closed syllable tokens (dane, dave) with the same F0 contour, a subset did not. Results indicate that, in general, listeners perceptually discount F0 over coda regions when judging overall F0 level, and the degree of discount is related to the (lack of) sonority in the coda: day tokens are judged significantly higher than dane tokens which are judged significantly higher than dave tokens with the same F0 contour (dane-dave p < 0.001, dane-day p < 0.01). However, individual dif- ferences are observed: ten listeners showed no significant differences in the perception of F0 levels between the three types of tokens. On the other hand, a contrasting subset of ten subjects demonstrated highly significant differences (p< 0.001). The remaining 42 subjects behaved similarly to the entire subject pool with only slightly less significant differences between dane and day F0 level judgments (p < 0.05). Therefore, for about 16% of subjects, the F0 over the coda is not discounted in judging F0 level. These individual responses in F0 scaling perception mirror differences found in the Frequency Following Response (e.g., [1]) and could indicate individual differences in F0 processing.