Perception of Pseudoswedish tonal contrasts by native speakers of American English: Implications for models of intonation perception

Results from an experiment on perception of lexical pitch accents in Gothenburg Swedish (11) showed that both higher initial F0 plateaux and later falls biased native listeners toward the Accent 2 category, while lower plateaux and earlier falls biased toward Accent 1. Segerup and Nolan interpret this as evidence for a perceptual mechanism integrating scaling and timing information, which they model using a measure of Area under the F0 Curve. It is not clear, however, that this result generalizes beyond native listeners. An analogous experiment on American English listeners demonstrates the same perceptual biases, suggesting that the mechanism responsible is indeed a more general phenomenon, and that it involves the integration of pitch information over time during some region of interest. An alternative to the AUC model, based on the Tonal Center-of-Gravity, could also account for these results, though current data do not distinguish between the two models.