This study investigates the role of pitch reset in discourse boundary perception. Previous production studies showed that pitch reset is a robust correlate of discourse boundaries. It not only signals boundary location, but also reflects boundary sizes. In this study, one aims to investigate how listeners perceive and utilize this cue for boundary detection. Results showed that listeners’ perce...

Because some users of a Hybrid short-electrode cochlear implant (CI) lose their low-frequency residual hearing after receiving the CI, we tested whether increasing the CI speech processor frequency allocation range to include lower frequencies improves speech perception in these individuals. A secondary goal was to see if pitch perception changed after experience with the new CI frequency alloc...

One reason for the poor pitch performance in current cochlear-implant users may be the highly synchronized neural firing in electric hearing that lacks stochastic properties of neural firing in normal acoustic hearing. This study used three different electric stimulation patterns, jittered, probabilistic, and auditory-model-generated pulses, to mimic some aspects of the normal neural firing pat...

The perception of music and speech both involve processing complex acoustic stimuli. It remains unclear, however, whether the same or distinct mechanisms are implicated in music and speech perception. Previous research suggested that musical training may facilitate linguistic pitch perception. (Alexander, Wong, and Bradlow, 2005) Deutsch et al (2006) reported higher proportion of absolute pitch...

A new quantitative model of tonal perception for continuous speech is described. The paper illustrates its ability for automatic stylization of pitch contours, with applications to prosodic analysis and speech synthesis in mind, and evaluates it in a perception experiment. After a discussion of the psychoacoustics of tonal perception and an overview of existing tonal perception models and syste...

Musically tone-deaf individuals have psychophysical deficits in detecting pitch changes, yet their discrimination of intonation contours in speech appears to be normal. One hypothesis for this dissociation is that intonation contours use coarse pitch contrasts which exceed the pitch-change detection thresholds of tone-deaf individuals (). We test this idea by presenting intonation contours for ...

Congenital amusia is a lifelong disorder of music processing that has been ascribed to impaired pitch perception and memory. The present study tested a large group of amusics (n=17) and provided evidence that their pitch deficit affects pitch processing in speech to a lesser extent: Fine-grained pitch discrimination was better in spoken syllables than in acoustically matched tones. Unlike amusi...

Pitch discrimination and accuracy has been found to depend on different factors. However, little work has been done (1) on the cross-linguistic influence of the listeners’ native language and (2) on the influence of the spectral structure on the pitch perception of vowels as well as (3) cross-linguistic differences regarding different levels of muscial education. If differences in pitch discrim...

The pitch of a sound is where we perceive it to lie on a musical scale. Like all sensations, pitch is a subjective quantity related to physical attributes of the stimulus, in this case mainly its component frequencies. For a pure tone with a single frequency component, the relation is monotonic and enables us to adopt an operational definition of pitch in terms of frequency: the pitch of an arb...

Absolute pitch (AP) is a form of sound recognition in which musical note names are associated with discrete musical pitch categories. The accuracy of pitch matching by non-AP musicians for chords has recently been shown to depend on stimulus familiarity, pointing to a role of spectral recognition mechanisms in the early stages of pitch processing. Here we show that pitch matching accuracy by AP...