Cross-linguistic perception of pitch position

Abstract

Pitch contrasts signal word meanings by pitch contours (rise versus fall), pitch levels (high versus low) or positions (earlier or later in a word). Previous studies have largely focused on native or non-native perception of pitch contours and pitch levels (Gandour 1983; Wang et al. 1976; Hallé et al. 2004; Xu et al. 2006; among others). Few studies have been directed towards perception of pitch positions. To fill in the gap, the current study made an attempt to investigate perception of pitch position by listeners of different word prosodic systems, Dutch listeners (stress system) and Japanese listeners (pitch accent system). Dutch resembles Japanese in that they both use positional marking to signal lexical items, but they differ by the means: Dutch exploits the location of stress while Japanese employs pitch accent for positional marking. The two languages also differ in the role of pitch function at the word level. Pitch is one of the acoustic correlates in Dutch stress while pitch in Japanese is exploited exclusively to distinguish lexical meanings. Given these, the current study aimed to examine whether Dutch listeners whose native languages do not have lexically contrastive pitch were able to perceive non-native pitch position contrasts at the acoustic level and phonological level. An ABX discrimination task and a sequence recall task were implemented in the study for the purpose of examining listeners’ acoustic perception and phonological perception, respectively. Results of the two experiments were discussed with respect to the predictions from different perceptual models. The study made an attempt to provide an understanding of how pitch processing is influenced by native languages.