This study investigates whether congenital amusia (an inability to perceive music from birth) also impairs the perception of musical qualities that do not rely on fine-grained pitch discrimination. We established that G.G. (64-year-old male, age-typical hearing) met the criteria of congenital amusia and demonstrated music-specific deficits (e.g., language processing, intonation, prosody, fine-g...

Amplitude envelope co-varies with F0 in Mandarin lexical tones. It can cue lexical tone perception in a tone language such as Mandarin which uses different pitch contours for phonemic contrasts. The current study investigated whether amplitude envelope could also aid the perception of lexical tones in a language such as Cantonese which uses both pitch contour and relative pitch height for phone...

Pitch intervals are central to most musical systems, which utilize pitch at the expense of other acoustic dimensions. It seemed plausible that pitch might uniquely permit precise perception of the interval separating two sounds, as this could help explain its importance in music. To explore this notion, a simple discrimination task was used to measure the precision of interval perception for th...

In this study, we investigated the influence of tonal relatedness on pitch perception in melodies. Tonal expectations for target tones were manipulated in melodic contexts while controlling sensory expectations, thus allowing us to assess specifically the influence oftonal expectations on pitch perception. Three experimentsprovided converging evidence that tonal relatedness modulates pitch perc...

Pitch variation is pervasive in speech, regardless of the language to which infants are exposed. Lexical tone is influenced by general sensitivity to pitch. We examined whether the development in lexical tone perception may develop in parallel with perception of pitch in other cognitive domains namely music. Using a visual fixation paradigm, 100 and one 4- and 12-month-old Dutch infants were te...

Amplitude envelope co-varies with F0 in Mandarin lexical tones. It can cue lexical tone perception in a tone language such as Mandarin which uses different pitch contours for phonemic contrasts. The current study investigated whether amplitude envelope could also aid the perception of lexical tones in a language such as Cantonese which uses both pitch contour and relative pitch height for phone...

Tokyo Japanese has a lexical pitch-accent system whereas Seoul Korean features no wordlevel tonal representations. The present study investigated phonological perception of lexical pitch-accent by advanced Seoul Korean learners of Japanese, via sequence-recall experiments. The results, on the contrary to our prediction, showed that advanced Korean learners performed as well as native Japanese s...

Absolute pitch (AP) is the term used to denote the cognitive ability to spontaneously and effortlessly identify and vocally produce specific musical tones without a reference note. Abnormalities of pitch perception are a recognized rare side effect of carbamazepine (CBZ). The mechanism of this side effect is not clear. The same symptom may also be associated with oxcarbazepine (OXC) although th...

Voice gender perception can be thought of as a mixture of low-level perceptual feature extraction and higher-level cognitive processes. Although it seems apparent that voice gender perception would rely on low-level pitch analysis, many lines of research suggest that this is not the case. Indeed, voice gender perception has been shown to rely on timbre perception and to be categorical, i.e., to...

In this paper, we study the significance of aperiodicity in the pitch-perception of expressive voices such as Noh voice and laughter signals. The excitation source characteristics in the production of these signals is represented in terms of a sequence of impulses. The impulse sequence is derived from the acoustic signal using a modified zero-frequency filtering method. The time intervals betwe...