Effects of Stimulus Duration and Vowel Quality in Tone Perception by English Musicians and Non-musicians

Effects of Stimulus Duration and Vowel Quality in Tone Perception by English Musicians and Non-musicians Si Chen Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China sarah.chen@polyu.edu.hk Yiqing Zhu Department of Linguistics, University of Florida Florida, U. S. yiqingzhu@ufl.edu Ratree Wayland Department of Linguistics, University of Florida Florida, U. S. ratree@ufl.edu Yike Yang Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China yi-ke.yang@connect.polyu.hk Abstract The link between music and language has been a subject of great interest, and evidence suggesting a connection between musical abilities and prosodic processing skills in language is growing. Acoustic fundamental frequency (F0), perceived as pitch, differentiates notes in music and word meaning in lexical tone languages. This study examines categorical perception of pitch stimuli among 14 English musicians and 15 English non-musicians, both groups having no exposure to tonal languages. The stimuli consist of continua of falling and rising F0 contours produced on high and low vowels with 9 different durations. The results revealed that musicians were more sensitive to variation in stimulus duration than non- musicians were, and music experience enhanced the sharpness of category boundaries. Significant main effects of vowel quality and pitch directions as well as two-way interactions between vowel and pitch direction, vowel and duration, group and duration, and pitch direction and duration on identification rate were also found. Formulae for minimum duration required for English musicians and non-English musicians to perceive rising and falling F0 were derived, revealing that musicians require less time to perceive a pitch fall and rise if the change is less than 12semitones. Index Terms: categorical perception, Mandarin tones, vowel quality, stimulus duration 1 Introduction Categorical perception (CP) refers to the phenomenon wherein listeners are better at distinguishing stimuli from different categories than distinguishing stimuli from the same category (Goldstone and Hendrickson, 2010). Enhanced perceptual sensitivity to cross-category differences requires the mapping of acoustically variable phonetic units into finite phonological categories, a skill crucial for speech perception (Kuhl, 2004). CP has been investigated at both segmental and suprasegmental levels (Flege et al., 1994; Changet al., 2016; Boersma and Chládková, 2013) and is commonly characterized by a sharp category boundary, a corresponding discrimination peak, and the predictability of discrimination from identification (Treisman et al., 1995). For lexical tones, a few studies showed that Mandarin tones are perceived categorically by native listeners, but not by non-native tone language listeners (Peng et al., 2010; Xu et al., 2006). Acoustic fundamental frequency (F0) or its auditory impression of pitch is a common perceptual object in music and language. It differentiates notes in music and word meaning in lexical tone languages such as Mandarin. Associations between musical ability and accuracy at perceiving lexical tone contrasts have been reported in previous investigations (Wayland et al., 2010; Zhao and Kuhl, 2015; Lee and Hung, 2008). For example, English-speaking musicians and non-musicians with no prior tone language PACLIC 32 98 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation Hong …

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