The present study investigates the boundaries of speech and song from an acoustic-perceptual perspective. Using the speech-to-song illusion as a method, we tested rhythmic and tonal hypotheses to find out whether acoustic characteristics can cue the perceptual classification of a sentence by German listeners as sung or spoken. First, our results show that, despite individual differences, the speech-to-song illusion is a robust perceptual phenomenon comparable to those known in visual perception. Second, the experiment revealed that acoustic parameters – especially tonal structure – facilitate the perceptual shift from speech to song pointing to an acoustically guided decoding strategy for speech- vs. song-like signals.
Index Terms: perception, illusion, intonation, tone, rhythm, music
Cite as: Falk, S., Rathcke, T. (2010) On the speech-to-song illusion: evidence from German. Proc. Speech Prosody 2010, paper 169
@inproceedings{falk10_speechprosody,
author={Simone Falk and Tamara Rathcke},
title={{On the speech-to-song illusion: evidence from German}},
year=2010,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2010},
pages={paper 169}
}