A fundamental bias for residue pitch perception in tone language speakers

A complex tone composed of only higher-order harmonics elicits a pitch percept equivalent to the tone's missing fundamental frequency (f0). When judging the direction of residue pitch change between two such tones, however, listeners may have completely opposite perceptual experiences depending on whether they are biased to perceive changes based on the overall spectrum or the missing f0 (harmonic spacing). Individual differences in residue pitch change judgments are reliable and have been associated with differences in functional neuroanatomy and musical experience. Tone languages put greater pitch processing demands on their speakers than nontone languages, and we investigated whether these lifelong differences in linguistic pitch processing affect listeners' bias for residue pitch. We found that tone language speakers are significantly more likely to perceive pitch changes based on the missing f0 than English speakers. These results suggest that tonelanguage speakers' privileged experience with linguistic pitch fundamentally tunes their basic auditory processing.