Intrinsic pitch differences between German vowels /i/, // and /y/ in a cross-linguistic perception experiment

Perceived pitch differences between high vs. low vowels with identical F0 have been reported in the literature. On the speech production side, in German a specific phenomenon is found: Tense and lax vowels differ in their tongue height but tend to have a similar F0. On the speech perception side, our aim was to test whether German listeners judge the tongue height or real F0 of tense and lax vowel pairs. Therefore a vowel pitch comparison experiment was conducted for three different German vowels /i y / showing a similar phonological vowel height, but differing in their tense/lax distinction and roundedness. The second question examined was whether pitch perception was influenced by language inventory. Therefore the same perception experiment was conducted cross-linguistically with Catalan listeners in Spain. Results show that the difference in tenseness was not significant in either language family, indicating that listeners judged the physical F0 instead of underlying articulatory settings. Roundedness affected pitch differences in both languages. Musical education influenced sensitivity to pitch differences only for German listeners. Surprisingly, Catalan listeners were insensitive to even large F0 changes and judged the pitch differences in vowels mainly based on the categorical vowel identity, independently of their musical education.