Pith, perceived duration and auditory biases : Comparison among languages

In addition to fundamental frequency height, its movement is also generally assumed to lengthen the perceived duration of syllable-like sounds. The lengthening effect has been observed for some languages (US English, French, SwissGerman, Japanese) but reported to be absent for another (Thai, Latin American Spanish, German). In this work, native speakers of Estonian, Finnish, Mandarin and Swedish performed a two-alternative forced choice duration discrimination experiment with pairs of complex tones varying in several acoustic dimensions. According to a logistic regression analysis, the duration judgements are affected by intensity, f0 level, and f0 movement for all languages, but the strength of these influences varies across languages and a pattern revealed by the relative strengths correlates with phonological properties of the languages. The findings are discussed in the light of current hypotheses of the origin of pitch modulation of perceived duration