Congenital amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder that may affect the processing of both music pitch and lexical tone. In the present study, the just-noticeable differences (JNDs) of tone pitch contour change were examined for three groups of Mandarin-native listeners: amusics with (tone agnosics) and without lexical tone difficulties (pure amusics), and matched controls. Tone agnosics showed significantly larger JNDs than normal controls, while pure amusics performed comparably with the controls. These results suggest that only those amusics with behavioral lexical tone deficits might be psychophysically impaired in pitch contour discrimination.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4923268 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Vocal and Facial Behavior During Affect Production in Autism Spectrum Disorder.
J Speech Lang Hear Res
December 2024
University of California, San Francisco.
Purpose: We investigate the extent to which automated audiovisual metrics extracted during an affect production task show statistically significant differences between a cohort of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing controls.
Method: Forty children with ASD and 21 neurotypical controls interacted with a multimodal conversational platform with a virtual agent, Tina, who guided them through tasks prompting facial and vocal communication of four emotions-happy, angry, sad, and afraid-under conditions of high and low verbal and social cognitive task demands.
Results: Individuals with ASD exhibited greater standard deviation of the fundamental frequency of the voice with the minima and maxima of the pitch contour occurring at an earlier time point as compared to controls.
Flexibility and Stability in Lexical Tone Recalibration: Evidence from Tone Perceptual Learning.
Lang Speech
December 2024
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, The Netherlands; Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, The Netherlands.
Listeners adjust their perception of sound categories when confronted with variations in speech. Previous research on speech recalibration has primarily focused on segmental variation, demonstrating that recalibration tends to be specific to individual speakers and situations and often persists over time. In this study, we present findings on the perceptual learning of lexical tone in Standard Chinese, a suprasegmental feature signaled primarily through pitch variations to distinguish morpheme/word meanings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProsodic Preferences of Surface Electromyography-based Subvocal Speech for People With Laryngectomy.
J Voice
December 2024
Delsys, Inc., Natick, Massachusetts 01760; Altec, Inc., Natick, Massachusetts 01760; Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215. Electronic address:
Introduction: People who undergo a total laryngectomy lose their natural voice and depend on alaryngeal technologies for communication. However, these technologies are often difficult to use and lack prosody. Surface electromyographic-based silent speech interfaces are novel communication systems that overcome many of the shortcomings of traditional alaryngeal speech and have the potential to seamlessly incorporate individualized prosody.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe influence of dialect loss on tone perception: Diminishing voice quality cues in preserved tone contrast.
J Acoust Soc Am
December 2024
School of Chinese Language and Literature, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China.
This study examines whether cue integration in tone perception undergoes changes caused by disparities in language experience among two groups of multidialectal speakers from Changsha: participants in the dialect-preserving group speak Changsha dialect (CD), Changsha Plastic Mandarin (CPM), and Standard Mandarin (SM), whereas participants in the dialect-lost group speak CPM and SM but not CD. An identification test on T1 and T4 was conducted, both of which are present in the CD and CPM. T1 and T4 are associated with a high pitch, but they differ in pitch height, pitch contour, and voice quality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPerception and Production of Pitch Information in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.
J Autism Dev Disord
November 2024
School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Shandong University, Jinan, China.
This study investigated the categorical perception (CP) of linguistic pitch (lexical tones) and nonlinguistic pitch (pure tones), as well as tonal production in Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A total of 26 Mandarin-speaking children with ASD and 29 age-matched typically developing (TD) children were recruited for this study. The Mandarin T2-T3 contrast and corresponding pure tones with identical pitch contours were adopted to assess the nuanced pitch processing abilities of the child participants via the CP paradigm.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!