title: The effect of spectral manipulations on the identification of affective and linguistic prosody.
abstract: We investigated the effect of various spectral manipulations on the identification of sentential prosody. Two main categories of prosody--affective (happy, angry, sad) and linguistic (statement, question, continuation)--were studied. Thirty-six subjects were presented with stimuli that were recorded by a female native speaker of American English. The stimuli were digitally manipulated to create synthesized, band-pass filtered (F0-range and F2/F3-range) and re-entrant (pitch only version of stimulus is convolved with a steady-state signal) conditions. Results of a forced-choice discrimination paradigm showed that, in general, performance is remarkably robust despite spectral manipulation, even when there is relatively little spectral information. However, performance was significantly degraded in the low band-pass and re-entrant conditions. These observations are discussed in light of the relevance of the fundamental frequency as well as syllabification for the analysis of prosodic information.
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory, Department of Biology, University of Maryland at College Park, 1401 Marie Mount Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
authors.forename: Kala
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lakshminarayanan
authors.forename: Dorit
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Ben Shalom
authors.forename: Virginie
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: van Wassenhove
authors.forename: Diana
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Orbelo
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Houde
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Poeppel
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D010898:Pitch Perception; D011897:Random Allocation; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*