Effects of F0 Acoustic Parameters on the Perception of Serbian Lexical Pitch Accents

Abstract

The study examines the discrimination of Serbian lexical pitch accent types by English, Mandarin, and Persian listeners. These groups of speakers were selected because of different word-prosodic systems of each language. For example, Serbian is a lexical pitch accent language, English is a stress-accented language, Mandarin is a tone language, and Persian could likely belong either to stress languages or to lexical pitch accent languages. All the participants were naïve listeners, that is, they had never been exposed to Serbian prior to the task. The participants were required to carry out an AX task on short Serbian sentences in which 1) a target item was not manipulated at all, 2) a target item's F0 alignment was modified, 3) a target item's F0 height was modified, and 4) a target item's F0 alignment and height were modulated in tandem. The results showed that both the F0 alignment and F0 height had an impact on the perception of Serbian lexical pitch accents for Mandarin and English speakers, but not for Persian speakers, which suggested that the perception of lexical pitch accents was contingent on the speakers' L1 prosodic system.