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Effects of Stimulus Duration and Vowel Quality in Tone Perception by English Musicians and Non-musicians

Paper · 2018 · Si Chen, Yiqing Zhu, Ratree Wayland et al.

Summary

The study asks whether musical training changes how listeners with no tone-language background sort pitch contours into categories. It also asks how stimulus length and vowel type shape that sorting. Fourteen English-speaking musicians and fifteen English-speaking non-musicians did an identification task. The stimuli were seven-step continua running from level to falling and from level to rising F0, resynthesised with PSOLA on [a] and [i] at nine durations from 40 to 200 ms. The authors fitted generalized linear mixed models with lme4. They read the logistic slope coefficient as the sharpness of the category boundary and compared conditions with likelihood ratio tests. Musicians had sharper boundaries, and their sharpness grew faster as stimuli got longer. Vowel quality, pitch direction and several two-way interactions also affected identification. Fitted linear formulae for the minimum duration needed to hear a rise or fall showed that musicians need less time when the pitch change stays under about 11–12 semitones. The findings support a transfer from musical pitch skill to linguistic tone perception.

Key points

  • Participants were 14 musicians (mean of roughly 14 years of training) and 15 non-musicians, all English speakers with no tone-language instruction. Some of the non-musician data had already appeared in Chen et al. (2017).
  • The design had 36 continua (2 directions × 2 vowels × 9 durations), each with 7 steps spaced equally on the ERB scale. With 5 repetitions this gave 1260 trials per listener, run in separate falling and rising blocks.
  • Contour slopes came from a Mandarin underlying pitch-target estimate (slope 93.4, intercept −2.2 st, converted to Hz with a 130 Hz baseline).
  • Musicians and non-musicians differed significantly in the intercept and slope of the minimum-duration formulae (χ²(2) = 12.18, p = 0.002). Musicians had smaller intercepts and steeper slopes.
  • Perceiving a contour took less time than producing it only when the rise exceeded 6 st or the fall exceeded 8 st. On high vowels, musicians needed less time to identify both directions.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Present a classifier with a graded continuum of inputs between two categories, fit a logistic curve, and treat its slope as a single measure of how crisp the decision boundary is.
  • I2. To test whether two conditions really differ, compare a model where a coefficient is shared with one where it is free to vary, using a likelihood ratio test.
  • I3. Instead of reporting one average gap, fit performance as a function of task magnitude and report the crossover point where one group stops beating the other (here around 11–12 st).
  • I4. Synthetic stimuli were anchored to parameters estimated from real speech and spaced on a perception-motivated scale, not on arbitrary raw units.
  • I5. A nuisance factor (vowel quality) was crossed with the main factors and turned out to interact with them, showing that hidden carrier properties can shift results.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Build minimally edited sentence series (for example, gradually shifting an attachment cue) and measure how sharply the parser's choice flips, to tell principled decisions from fuzzy ones.
  • I2 (learn): Use the same tied-versus-free test when checking whether a new repair rule or teacher tier changes parser behaviour on a subset, rather than eyeballing accuracy gaps.
  • I3 (learn): Plot perceptron parser vs gparse accuracy against sentence length or dependency distance and report where the advantage flips, which guides when to route input to which parser.
  • I4 (learn): When generating synthetic training or probe sentences, draw their parameters (lengths, construction frequencies) from treebank statistics, so that controlled tests still resemble natural text.
  • I5 (answer): Cross surface variables such as name choice or tense with the question type in school-test and fable QA evaluations, to detect answers that depend on incidental wording.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityHong Kong · China106 works · 5,190 citations🎓University of FloridaGainesville · United States36 works · 364 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksPsychology · 1,649 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 930 worksNeuroscience · 186 worksCognitive Neuroscience · 185 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,379 works

Cite

Cite as Si Chen, Yiqing Zhu, Ratree Wayland and Yike Yang. 2018. Effects of Stimulus Duration and Vowel Quality in Tone Perception by English Musicians and Non-musicians. Proceedings of the 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{chen2018effects,
  title = {{Effects of Stimulus Duration and Vowel Quality in Tone Perception by English Musicians and Non-musicians}},
  author = {Si Chen, Yiqing Zhu, Ratree Wayland and Yike Yang},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation},
  year = {2018},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/Y18-1011/}
}

References

27 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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