The influence of tone language experience and speech style on the use of intonation in language discrimination.

This work tests whether listeners' use of suprasegmental information in speech perception is modulated by language background and speech style. Native Mandarin (tone language) and Malay (non-tone language) listeners completed an AX language discrimination task with four levels of signal degradation and two speech styles. Listeners in both groups showed more benefit from pitch information in read than in spontaneous speech. Mandarin listeners showed a greater benefit than Malay listeners from the inclusion of f0 information in a segmentally degraded signal, suggesting that experience with lexical tone may extend to increased attention and/or sensitivity to phrase-level pitch contours.