Abstract
The speech signal contains at least two types of information: the linguistic information and a talker’s voice. In this study we examined how congenital
amusia, a pitch-processing disorder, affects the recognition of talkers’ voices. Twenty Mandarinspeaking amusics and 20 controls were tested on talker recognition in four types of contexts that varied in language familiarity: Mandarin real words, Mandarin pseudowords, Arabic words and reversed
Mandarin speech. We found that the deficit in amusia affects talker recognition in that amusics demonstrated degraded performance in both native language conditions that contain phonological cues to facilitate talker recognition and non-native conditions where talker recognition primarily relies on phonetics cues including pitch. Altogether, the results suggested that the scope of amusia is beyond the pitch-related processing in linguistic dimension, but also extends to the talker dimension in speech signal.
amusia, a pitch-processing disorder, affects the recognition of talkers’ voices. Twenty Mandarinspeaking amusics and 20 controls were tested on talker recognition in four types of contexts that varied in language familiarity: Mandarin real words, Mandarin pseudowords, Arabic words and reversed
Mandarin speech. We found that the deficit in amusia affects talker recognition in that amusics demonstrated degraded performance in both native language conditions that contain phonological cues to facilitate talker recognition and non-native conditions where talker recognition primarily relies on phonetics cues including pitch. Altogether, the results suggested that the scope of amusia is beyond the pitch-related processing in linguistic dimension, but also extends to the talker dimension in speech signal.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences |
| Editors | Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabian, Paul Warren |
| Publisher | Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc. |
| Pages | 1808-1812 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-0-646-80069-1 |
| Publication status | Published - 9 Aug 2019 |
| Event | The 19th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) - Melbourne, Australia Duration: 5 Aug 2019 → 9 Aug 2019 |
Conference
| Conference | The 19th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | Australia |
| City | Melbourne |
| Period | 5/08/19 → 9/08/19 |
Keywords
- congenital amusia
- talker processing
- pitch
- language familiarity
- Mandarin Chinese