The Autosegmental-metrical model of prosody [1,2] holds that pitch melodies can be modeled with level low and high tones; information about the shape of the pitch contour is not part of the phonological representation. Yet recent results [3,4] show that contour shape affects the perception of tone height and timing. A pitch plateau that maintains a level pitch at its peak will be perceived as h...

In music, multiple pitches often occur simultaneously, an essential feature of harmony. In the present study, the authors assessed the ability of cochlear implant (CI) users to perceive polyphonic pitch. Acoustically presented stimuli consisted of one, two, or three superposed tones with different fundamental frequencies (f(0)). The normal hearing control group obtained significantly higher mea...

Cochlear implants (CIs) are auditory prostheses that restore hearing via electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve. Compared to normal acoustic hearing, sounds transmitted through the CI are spectro-temporally degraded, causing difficulties in challenging listening tasks such as speech intelligibility in noise and perception of music. In normal hearing (NH), musicians have been shown to bett...

We report on an experiment with a Talking Head, aimed at finding out the relative contributions of pitch accents and rapid eyebrow movements for the perception of focus. For this purpose, we use a “dialogue reconstruction” experiment: subjects have to perform a perceptual task in which they have to determine on the basis of the distributions of pitch accent and eyebrow movements what the focus ...

Music and language share many attributes and a large body of evidence shows that sensitivity to acoustic cues in music is positively related to language development and even subsequent reading acquisition. However, such association was mainly found in alphabetic languages. What remains unclear is whether sensitivity to acoustic cues in music is associated with reading in Chinese, a morphosyllab...

Recent temporal models of pitch and amplitude modulation perception converge on a relatively realistic implementation of cochlear processing followed by a temporal analysis of periodicity. However, for modulation perception, a modulation filterbank is applied whereas for pitch perception, autocorrelation is applied. Considering the large overlap in pitch and modulation perception, this is not p...

Tone recognition is the core function in Chinese speech perception. The tone perception ability of people with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is often weaker than normal people. Automatically tone enhancement would be useful in helping them understand Chinese speech better. In this paper, we focus on the tone enhancing model for Chinese disyllable words. We first analyze the acoustic feature...

PURPOSE Natural speech comes with variation in pitch, which serves as an important cue for speech recognition. The present study investigated older listeners' dynamic pitch perception with a focus on interindividual variability. In particular, we asked whether some of the older listeners' inability to perceive dynamic pitch stems from the higher susceptibility to the interference from formant c...

Languages differ in the way that speakers coordinate their interaction moment-by-moment, and this can cause intercultural misunderstandings. We explore this in the domain of listening behavior. One way that listeners show interest and attention is by producing back-channel feedback (short utterances such as okay and hmm) at appropriate times, and these times are determined, in part, by the inte...

We conducted a perception study on Mandarin, a tone language where pitch carries contrastive information, to investigate whether pitch changes interfere with spectral information in determining the number of syllables in an utterance. We generated F0 contours and simulated tonal coarticulation using the qTA model [1]. The perception of syllable numbers depended on the perception of tones, and t...