Weighting of cues to categorization of song versus speech in tone language and non-tone-language speakers

Abstract

One of the most important categorization tasks a listener faces is to determine a sound’s domain, a decision which is a prerequisite for successful within-domain categorization such as distinguishing between different speech sounds or musical notes. Nevertheless, little is known about what acoustic cues listeners use to distinguish between domains such as speech and song. In particular, it remains unclear whether there are cross- cultural differences in the evidence upon which listeners rely when categorizing speech and song. Here we made use of the speech-to-song illusion, in which some spoken phrases perceptually transform into songs when repeated, to investigate cues to domain-level categorization in native English, Mandarin, and Cantonese speakers living in the United Kingdom and China. We find that listeners from different cultural and language backgrounds largely agree on which spoken phrases sound like song after repetition and that the strength of this transformation does not vary across countries of residence or language backgrounds. Furthermore, we find striking similarity in the cues upon which listeners rely when perceiving song versus speech, including small pitch intervals, flat within-syllable pitch contours, steady beats, and fit to a musical key. However, the use of pairwise durational variability as a cue varied across the tone language and non-tone- language speakers. These findings support the emerging view that there are widespread cross-cultural similarities in the acoustics and perception of music.