Neuro-cognitive differences in pitch perception affect pitch adaptation

old_uid11437
titleNeuro-cognitive differences in pitch perception affect pitch adaptation
start_date2012/05/25
schedule11h
onlineno
location_infoA
summaryPitch adaptation plays an important role in human interaction in that it functions as a cue to the approach-avoidance mechanism. However, some speakers appear to be better equipped than others to extract information about pitch from the speech signal. Due to neuroanatomical differences, listeners show an individual auditory perception bias either for the sound as a whole (fundamental listeners) or for its harmonic constituents (spectral listeners). Previous studies showed a relation between listener bias and musical instrument preference, as well as language learning. These results indicate that the dominant listening mode affects higher level processing in various cognitive domains. In our study, we used a psychoacoustic perceptual test with missing fundamental frequencies to determine speakers' listener bias and subsequently collected their speech data in a classical shadowing task with two conditions, one with a full speech signal and one with high-pass filtered speech above 300 Hz. In both conditions, speakers with fundamental listener bias adapted more to the F0 of the model talker, but the effect was more pronounced in the high-pass filtered condition. In a second experiment with the same participant group, we tested if fundamental listener bias also results in a possible advantage in emotion recognition. Using a sample of 8 emotions acted by 8 speakers (male and female) from the Geneva corpus of emotional speech, we found a small correlation between the ability to recognize emotions and the listener bias.
responsiblesBel, Welby