Native language affects the perception of segmental phonetic structure, of stress, and of semantic and pragmatic effects of intonation. Similarly, native language might influence the perception of similarities and differences among intonation contours. To test this hypothesis, a cross-language experiment was conducted. An English utterance was resynthesized with seven falling and four rising intonation contours. English, Iberian Spanish, and Chinese listeners then rated each pair of nonidentical stimuli for degree of difference. Multidimensionals caling of the results supported the hypothesis. The three groups of listeners produced statistically different perceptual configurations for the falling contours. All groups, however, perceptually separated the falling from the rising contours. This result suggested that the perception of intonation begins with the activation of universal auditory mechanisms that process the direction of relatively slow frequency modulationd A second experiment there fore employed frequency-modulated sine waves that duplicated the fundamental frequency contours of the speech stimuli. New groups of English, Spanish, and Chinese subjects yielded no cross-language differences between the perceptual configurations for these nonspeech stimuli. The perception of similarities and differences among intonation contours calls upon universal auditory mechanisms whose output is molded by experience with one's native language.
Abramson, A.S., & Lisker, L. (1973). Voice timing perception in Spanish initial stops . Journal of Phonetics, 1, 1-8.
2.
Abramson, A.S., & Lisker, L. (1970). Discriminability along the voicing continuum: Crosslanguage tests. In B. Hala, M. Romportl, & P. Janota (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Prague, 1967 (pp. 569-573). Prague: Academia Publishing House of the Czeckoslovack Academy of Sciences .
3.
Ashby, F.G., Maddox, W.T., & Lee, W.W. (1994). On the dangers of averaging across subjects when using multidimensional scaling or the similarity-choice model, Psychological Science, 5, 144-151.
4.
Bartels, C., & Kingston, J. (1994). Salient pitch cues in the perception of contrastive focus. In P. Bosch & R. van der Sandt (Eds.), Proceedings of the Journal of Semantics Conference on Focus (pp. 1-10). IBM Working Papers TR-80.94-006.
5.
Beaugendre, F., House, D., & Hermes, D.J. (2001). Accentuation boundaries in Dutch, French and Swedish . Speech Communication, 33, 305-318.
6.
Beckman, M.E. (1986). Stress and nonstress accent. Dordrecht: Foris.
7.
Beckman, M.E., & Ayers Elam, G. (1997). Guidelines for ToBI labeling, version 3. Linguistics Department, Ohio State University . http://ling.ohio-state.edu/~tobi/ame_tobi/
8.
Best, C.T., McRoberts, G., & Sithole, N. (1988). Examination of perceptual reorganization for non-native speech contrasts: Zulu click discrimination by English speaker adults and infants. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 14, 345-360.
9.
Bladon, R.A., & Lindblom, B. (1981). Modeling the judgment of vowel quality differences . Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 69(5), 1414-1422.
10.
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (1996). PRAAT: A system for doing phonetics by computer . Report 132 of the Institute of Phonetic Sciences, University of Amsterdam.
11.
Burnham, D.K. (1986). Developmental loss of speech perception: Exposure to and experience with a first language. Applied Psycholinguistics , 7(3), 207-240.
12.
Carpentier, F., & Moulines, E. (1990). Pitch-synchronous wave form processing techniques for text-to-speech synthesis using diphones. Speech Communication9, 453-457.
13.
Chen, A., Rietveld, T., & Gussenhoven, C. (2001). Language specific effects of pitch range on the perception of universial intonational meaning. Proceedings of the 9th Eurospeech, Vol. 2, 1403-1406.
14.
Cruttenden, A. (1997). Intonation. Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press.
15.
Cruz-Ferreira, M. (1984). Perception and interpretation of non-native intonation patterns. In M. P. R. van der Broecke & A. Cohen, Eds. Proceedings of the 10th ICPhS. Utrecht. Dordrecht: Foris, 565-569.
16.
Cutler, A., & Chen, H.C. (1997). Lexical tone in Cantonese spoken-word processing . Perception and Psychophysics, 59(2), 165-179.
17.
Dupoux, E., Pallier, C., Sebastián, N., & Mehler, J. (1997). A distressing deafness in French? Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 406-421.
18.
Edwards, A.L. (1984). An introduction to linear regression and correlation (2nd ed.). New York: Freeman.
19.
Everitt, B.S., & Dunn, D. (1991). Applied multivariate data analysis. London: Arnold.
20.
Flege, J.E. (1995). Second language speech learning: Theory, findings and problems. In W. Strange (Ed.), Speechperception and linguistic experience: Theoretical and methodological issues in cross-language research (pp. 233-277). Timonium, MD : York Press.
21.
Flege, J.E., & Hillenbrand, J. (1986). Differential use of temporal cues to the /s/-/z/ contrast by native and non-native speakers of English . Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 79(2), 508-517.
22.
Flege, J.E., Munro, M.J., & Fox, R.A. (1994). Auditory and categorical effects on crosslanguage vowel perception. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America , 95(6), 3623-3641.
23.
Fox, R.A., & Lehiste, I. (1987). Discrimination of duration ratios by native English and Estonian Listeners. Journal of Phonetics, 15, 349-363.
24.
Fox, R.A., & Lehiste, I. (1989). Discrimination of duration ratios in bisyllabic tokens by native Englishand Estonian listeners. Journal of Phonetics, 17, 167-174.
25.
Gottfried, T.L., & Suiter, T.L. (1997). Effect of linguistic experience on the identification of Mandarin Chinese vowels and tones. Journal of Phonetics , 25, 207-231.
26.
Grabe, E. (1998). Comparative intonational phonology: English and German. MPI Series 7, Wageningen: Ponsen en Looien.
27.
Grabe, E., Nolan, F., & Farrar, K.J. (1998). IViE-a comparative transcription system for intonational variation in English. Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Spoken Language Processing. CD-ROM. (IEEE ICASSP Library Series, New York).
28.
Grabe, E., Post, B., & Nolan, F. (2001). Modeling intonational variation in English. The IViE system. In S. Puppel & G. Demenko (Eds.), Proceedings of Prosody 2000 (pp. 51-58). Poznan, Poland: Adam Mickiewitz University.
29.
Gussenhoven, C. (1984). On the grammar and semantics of sentence accents . Dordrecht: Foris.
30.
Gussenhoven, C. (1990). Tonal association domains and the prosodic hierarchy in English. In S. Ramsaran (Ed.), Studies in the pronunciation of English (pp.27-37). New York: Routledge.
31.
Gussenhoven, C. (2002). Intonation and interpretation: Phonetics and phonology . In B. Bel & L. Marlin (Eds.), Proceedings of the Speech Prosody 2002 Conference (pp.47-58). Aixen-Provence : Laboratoire Parole et Langage.
32.
Hart, J.'t, Collier, R., & Cohen, A. (1990).Aperceptual study of intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
33.
Hermes, D.J. (1997). Timing of pitch movements and accentuation of syllables in Dutch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America , 102, 2390-2402.
34.
Herman, R., & McGory, J.T. (1999). Mapping intonational transcribers' tone similarity space. Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences(pp.2331-2334). Berkeley : Congress Organizers.
35.
Hirst, D., & Di Cristo, A. (1998). Intonation systems. A survey of 20 languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
36.
House, D., Hermes, D., & Beaugendre, F. (1997). Temporal-alignment categories of accent-lending rises and falls. Proceedings of Eurospeech , 1997, Vol. 2, 879-882.
37.
Huang, T. (2001). Tone perception by speakers of Mandarin Chinese and American English. Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics, 55.
38.
Hume, E., Johnson, K., Seo, M., Tserdanelis, G., & Winters, S. (1999). A cross linguistic study of stop place perception . Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp.2069-2072). Berkeley: Congress Organizers.
39.
Hume, E., & Johnson, K. (2001). The role of speech perception in phonology. New York: Academic Press.
40.
Kingdon, R. (1958). The ground work of English intonation. London: Longman.
41.
Kohler, K.J. (1987a). Categorical pitch perception. Proceedings of the XIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (Vol. 5, pp. 331-333). Tallinn: Academy of Sciences of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic.
42.
Kohler, K.J. (1987b). The linguistic functions of F0 peaks. Proceedings of the Xith International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (Vol. 3, pp. 149 - 152). Tallinn: Academy of Sciences of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic .
43.
Kuhl, P.K., Williams, K.A., Lacerda, F., Stevens, K.N., & Lindblom, B. (1992). Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by six months of age. Science, 255, 606-608.
Lee, Y.-S., Vakoch, D., & Wurm, L. (1996). Tone perception in Cantonese and Mandarin: A cross-linguistic comparison. Journal of Psycho linguistic Research, 25, 527-542.
46.
Lehiste, I., & Fox, R.A. (1992). Perception of prominence by Estonian and English listeners. Language and Speech, 35(4), 419-434.
47.
Lisker, L., & Abramson, A.S. (1970). The voicing dimension: Some experiments in comparative phonetics. In B. Hala, M. Romportl, & P. Janota (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Prague, 1967 (pp. 563-567). Prague: Academia.
48.
Mielke, J. (2001). A perceptual account of Turkish h-deletion. Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics, 55.
49.
Miyakawa, K., Strange, W., Verbrugge, R., Liberman, A.M., Jenkins, J.J., & Fujimora, O. (1975). An effect of linguistic experience: The discrimination of [r] and [l] by native speakers of Japanese and English. Perception & Psychophysics, 18(5), 331-340.
50.
Nash, R., & Mulac, A. (1980). The intonation of verifiability. In L. R. Waugh & C. H. van Schooneveld (Eds.), The melody of language (pp.219-242). Baltimore: University Park Press.
Ohala, J. (1983). Cross-language use of pitch: An ethological view . Phonetica, 40, 1-18.
53.
Peperkamp, S., & Dupoux, E. (2002). A typological study of stress "deafness." In C. Gussenhoven& N. Warner (Eds.), Laboratory phonology 7 (pp. 203-240). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
54.
Pierrehumbert, J., & Steele, S. (1989). Categories of tonal alignment in English, Phonetica, 46, 181-196.
55.
Pisoni, D.B., Lively, S.E., & Logan, J.S. (1994). Perceptual learning of non-native speech contrasts: Implications for theories of speech perception. In J. C. Goodman & H. C. Nusbaum (Eds.), The development of speech perception: The transition from speech sounds to spoken words (pp. 121-166). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
56.
Polka, L. (1995). Linguistic influences in adult perception of non-native vowel contrasts. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America , 97(2), 1286-1296.
57.
Polka, L., & Werker, J. (1994). Developmental changes in perception of non-native vowel contrasts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 20, 421-435.
58.
Rosner, B.S., & Pickering, J.B. (1994). Vowel perception and production . Oxford: Oxford University Press .
59.
Schiffman, S., Reynolds, M.L., & Young, F.W. (198 1). Introduction to multidimensional scaling. New York: Academic Press.
60.
Silverman, K., Beckman, M.E., Pitrelli, J., Ostendorf, M., Wightman, C., Price, P., Pierrehumbert, J., & Hirschberg, J. (1992). ToBI: A standard for labeling English prosody. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Vol. 2, pp. 867 - 870). Banff, Canada.
61.
Sosa, J.M. (1999). La entonación del Español. Su estructura fónica, variabilidady dialectologia. Madrid: Cátedra.
62.
Spss Inc. (1999). SPSS Version 10.0. Chicago: SPSS, Inc.
63.
Werker, J.F., & Tees, R.C. (1992). The organization and reorganization of human speech perception. In M. Cowan (Ed.), Annual Review of Neuroscience, 15, 377-402.
64.
Williams, L. (1977). The perception of stop consonant voicing by Spanish-English bilinguals. Perception and Psychophysics, 21, 289-297.
