Effect of vowel on pitch discrimination of CV in Japanese

The pitch dynamics seem to be based on the pitch thresholds (DLs) between the Vowels, V and CV, and also CV and CV. In this study, the DLs were measured for discrimination of pitch (fundamental frequency) of complex tone, Japanese Vowel (V) and Consonance-Vowel (CV) speech. A nominal F0 of complex tone was 170 Hz and the pitch of V and CV speech were resynthesized same as 170Hz. Tone was band-pass filtered ranged from 1 to 5 of harmonic components. Tone and speech presented in threshold equalizing noise. As the results, the pitch DLs of V were same as the F0DL of complex tone and the DL of vowel “a” and “o” were larger and that of “e” was smaller. These results suggest that F1 information within the dominance region was used for pitch discrimination of complex tone of 170Hz-F0. It seems that temporal fine structure (TFS) information on F2 was used for pitch discrimination. For CV including /t/ and /k/, the DLs were depended on the vowel, because of voiceless consonant. Also, we measured the DLs between V and CV, as V-CV, then between CV and another CV, as CV-CV. The results shows the DLs of V-CV and CV-CV sound were estimated using the geometric mean of DLs between V and CV.