Is Intrinsic Pitch language-dependent? Evidences from a cross-linguistic vowel pitch experiment (with additional screening of the listeners dl for music and speech

Intrinsic Pitch differences (perceived pitch differences between high vs. low vowels) were found for Germanic languages. Our previous results gave evidence for a strong cross-linguistic difference when examining non-Germanic languages. We therefore designed a cross-linguistic vowel pitch discrimination experiment to examine the existence of intrinsic pitch in non-Germanic languages in comparison to Germanic languages. The experiment was conducted seperately with two groups of listeners: professional musicians and listeners who did not play an instrument at all. In a pre-experiment we screened the difference limen (dl) for the pitch discrimination of (1) musical stimuli and (2) speech stimuli. The reason was to screen the listeners’ ability to successfully manage the following vowel pitch discrimination experiments and to allow listeners to train to identify pitch differences, which facilitates the following experiment. Results for German listeners indicate intrinsic pitch differences corresponding to values given in literature. However, when examining groups differing in musical education it was found that intrinsic pitch is a weak phenomenon, with no significant results for the professional musicians. Results for Italian listeners show no pitch bias at all, indicating that intrinsic pitch is not present in this Romance language. We therefore give first evidence to the presented hypothesis that intrinsic pitch has to be classified as a language-specific phenomenon: It is assumed that the cue F0 is not used to classify vowel quality differences in the examined Romance languages.