Join us for short talks by our graduate students in the ILST program.

Speaker:Xin Gao

Title: How do social labeling and language experience affect the perception of nasal codas in Shanghai Mandarin?

Speaker: May Chan

Title: Cue integration in speech and music

Abstract:Listeners integrate multidimensional cues (e.g., spectral shape) during pitch processing in both speech and music. While prior works have shown that this effect applies to tonal and non-tonal speakers, it remains unclear whether listeners’ pitch processing strategies differ on different linguistic levels (e.g. tone vs intonation). Furthermore, work has yet to show whether differences in pitch processing lie between natural vs artificial sounds, or speech vs non-speech sounds. A pitch classification experiment investigated these questions. Listeners were either English or Cantonese speakers listening to stimuli modeled after Cantonese prosody, or English speakers listening to comparable violin stimuli. Results show that all participants integrate spectral cues in pitch perception. However, the effect of musicality on shift but not categoricity differed between Cantonese and English speech conditions. Overall results suggest shared pitch processing mechanisms across auditory domains.