The perception of f0 perturbations: preliminary findings and challenges

A consonant leaves a wake on the pitch of the following vowel, its early f0 riding a few to tens of hertz higher or lower. This consonant-related f0 perturbation (CF0) is one of the seeds of tonogenesis, the birth of tone. CF0 is well studied in production, but far less so in perception: how well can listeners actually hear it, and recover the onset pitch behind it? This talk presents preliminary findings on an online pitch-matching experiment from the ManyTones project. A 40-English-listener pilot points to two main things:

1. recovery of the onset is real but weak, much smaller than classic laboratory studies (Hombert 1975) would predict;
2. listeners vary enormously, with musical aptitude tracking who recovers the CF0 cue.