ESCA Workshop on Prosody Lund, Sweden September 27-29, 1993

Effect of Pitch Movement Timing on Perceived Duration and Prominence in Estonian and English Listeners

Robert Allen Fox (1), Ilse Lehiste (2)

(1) Department of Speech and Hearing Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
(2) Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

This study is one in a series in which we explore the possible influence of a listener's linguistic background on his/her perception of suprasegmental cues in the speech signal. Two experiments investigated the effect of the timing of a pitch rise on the perception of a medial syllable's perceived duration and/or prominence by native speakers of Estonian or American English. Results indicated that English subjects tended to perceive tokens with a later pitch rise as longer and more prominent than those with an early pitch rise. The reverse was true for the Estonian subjects in terms of perception of prominence but for these subjects, the timing of the pitch rise had little effect upon perceived duration.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Fox, Robert Allen / Lehiste, Ilse (1993): "Effect of pitch movement timing on perceived duration and prominence in estonian and English listeners", In Prosody-1993, 250-253.