Re: [AUDITORY] Long/Low & Short/High?

[Sarah Hawkins <sh110@xxxxxxxxx>]

    Dear Lori
    
    I add an example from speech perception to those other people have
    sent for music.
    
    Noel Nguyen and I found an association between pitch and perceived
    stop voicing in synthetic stimuli. Importantly from your point of
    view, the difference was found in perception but not in production.
    I explain at some length because it's a bit complicated and not that
    well known: the stop in question (/d/ or /t/) was at the end of a
    word whereas the manipulated pitch difference was at the beginning.
      We (and, separately, John Coleman) examined cues to phonological
    voicing contrast in word-final /d/ vs /t/ as in led vs let. Those
    cues are distributed over the entire syllable, including having
    longer /l/ as well as the better-known longer vowel. There were also
    systematic spectral differences in the [l]. No differences in f0 in
    this natural lab speech though.
         Hawkins, S., & Nguyen, N. (2004). Influence of
    syllable-coda voicing on the acoustic properties of syllable-onset
    /l/ in English. Journal of Phonetics, 32(2), 199-231.
    
    
    In a series of perceptual experiments, we manipulated durational and
    spectral cues to coda voicing in the onset of high-quality synthetic
    led vs let. We manipulated f0 as an independent variable because we
    had to make the usual types of decision re what to do with it when
    the duration of the [l] varied systematically and the pitch contour
    was to be a natural-sounding declination. Listeners heard only the
    [l] and the first few (80?) ms of the vowel. They had to respond
    (i.e. guess) whether the word was led or let.
    
    Duration of [l] was a strong cue but so was f0. Strong enough for us
    to have noticed it when making the stimuli, which is another reason
    we made it an IV.
    
    
    There were some interesting learning effects as well, but the point
    here is that English (and probably French) listeners may use low
    pitch as a cue to phonological voicing throughout the syllable. As
    you know, this difference in f0 is consistent with what happens
    around closure for the word-final stop itself, but as far as I know
    there's not evidence for it in the word onset in natural
    speech -- just for the durational and spectral difference.
           Hawkins, S., & Nguyen, N. (2001). Perception of coda
    voicing from properties of the onset and nucleus of 'led' and 'let'.
    In P. Dalsgaard, B. Lindberg, & H. Benner (Eds.), Eurospeech
    2001: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Speech
    Communication and Technology, (Vol. 1, pp. 407-410). 
    
    As a general comment, it may be worth considering the effect as
    related to onomatopoeic tendencies. There are always exceptions, but
    as far as I know there is some degree of association between size
    and pitch: little things higher and 'smaller' (shorter, faster,
    etc), big things lower and clunkier.  Noel and I suggested that,
    rather than the standard term coda 'voicing', it might be better to
    describe the whole syllable as 'sombre' for words like led.
    and 'bright' for words like let. This seems in line with
    both the whole-word complexity of the word-final voicing distinction
    in English, and the possibility that pitch can influence perception
    metaphorically, as it were.
    
    all best
    Sarah

On 01/11/2022 20:00, Lori Holt wrote:

Dear auditory aficionados,

Fred Dick and I have been doing some work with a long-short tone duration identification task (50ms vs 90ms) where tone frequency is chosen from one of x values in a truncated range (e.g., 800Hz, 920Hz, 1000Hz, 1080Hz, 1200Hz).  (You might be familiar with this paradigm from Mondor & Bregman, 1994). 

We have found a weak but quite reliable effect, where subjects tend to judge lower frequencies more often as 'long', and higher frequencies as 'short'.  This was unexpected yet remarkably consistent across a lot of experiments. We have been unable to track down mention of this in the literature.   

We did dig up a few papers that purported to be on the general topic of frequency effects on duration judgments, but these ended up being about different things entirely... 

We wondered whether anyone might be familiar with literature we've missed- or maybe even have encountered something like this before yourself? 

Best wishes,

Lori & Fred

______________________________________________________________

loriholt

Professor    | Department of Psychology

Professor    | Neuroscience Institute

Co-Director | Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition

Co-Director | Behavioral Brain (B2) Research Training Program (NIGMS)

Carnegie Mellon University

loriholt@xxxxxxx | www.psy.cmu.edu/~holtlab/

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