The aim of this study is to determine how pitch acceleration rates within and outside the normal pitch range may influence latency and amplitude of cortical pitch-specific responses (CPR) as a function of language experience (Chinese, English). Responses were elicited from a set of four pitch stimuli chosen to represent a range of acceleration rates (two each inside and outside the normal voice...

An algorithm based on dyadic wavelet transform (DyWT) has been developed for detecting pitch period. Pitch period is regarded as an important feature in designing and developing automatic speaker recognitionhdentification systems. In this paper, we have developed two methods for detecting pitch period of synthetic signals. In the first method, we estimated the pitch period using the original si...

Reliable pitch detection is important in Chinese speech recognition since Chinese is a tonal language. In this paper, several pitch information integration approaches are investigated. In a noise-free environment, conventional pitch estimators work quite well. In adverse conditions, however, robustness of pitch detection algorithms is still a challenging problem. Our experimental results show t...

This study presents new data on pitch accent (PA) alignment in Sardinian, a Romance language spoken in Italy. We propose that what has been described as “stress shift” involved in encliticization processes is not a change in the word level stress, but a change in the association of the pitch accent. Our claim is that word level stress remains in situ, and the falling tune which our data exhibit...

This study aims to provide direct perceptual evidence of whether listeners integrate spectral cues in pitch-range perception. A force-choice pitch classification experiment with four spectral conditions was conducted to investigate whether spectral cues manipulation can affect pitch-height perception. The results show that the pitch classification function is significantly shifted under differe...

This paper presents an exemplar-theoretic account of pitchaccent variability. Results from two experiments are reported. The first experiment examines variability / similarity across a range of pitch-accent contour types which vary in frequency of occurrence. The results report similar behaviour across the frequency bins and are indicative of pitch-accent immunity from frequency effects. The se...

Superior temporal and inferior frontal cortices are involved in the processing of pitch information in the domain of language and music. Here, we used fMRI to test the particular roles of these brain regions in the neural implementation of pitch in music and in tone language (Mandarin) with a group of Mandarin speaking musicians whose pertaining experiences in pitch are similar across domains. ...

This paper proposes a robust pitch extractor with application in Automatic Speech Recognition and based on selecting pitch lines of a tonegram (a representation of the different pitch energies at each frame time). First, the tonegram and its maximum energy regions are extracted and a Dynamic Time Warping algorithm finds the most energetic trajectories or pitch lines from these regions. A second...