Is It Speech or Song? Effect of Melody Priming on Pitch Perception of Modified Mandarin Speech.

ABSTRACT: Tonal languages make use of pitch variation for distinguishing lexical semantics, and their melodic richness seems comparable to that of music. The present study investigated a novel priming effect of melody on the pitch processing of Mandarin speech. When a spoken Mandarin utterance is preceded by a musical melody, which mimics the melody of the utterance, the listener is likely to perceive this utterance as song. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the neural substrates of this speech-to-song transformation. Pitch contours of spoken utterances were modified so that these utterances can be perceived as either speech or song. When modified speech (target) was preceded by a musical melody (prime) that mimics the speech melody, a task of judging the melodic similarity be

SUBMITTER: Tsai CG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6826721 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature