Speech to Song Illusion: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese

future experiment to probe into the robustness oftone pitch intervals in real-time speech (by usingcorpus methods) and its effect on intelligibility.Furthermore, I demonstrate how the intervalstructure (1.b) plays a less significant role whenthe duration condition is satisfied in (1.a) in theperception of speech to song illusion. All speechanalysis, synthesis, and manipulation are done onPraat (www.praat.com).II Analysis of Deutsch’s DataTo analyze Deutsch’s data, I pay particularattention to two data sets. In Deutsch’sexperiment, it was interesting to compare the twosets of recordings, one by the group (a) of 11subjects who were asked to reproduce the phraseafter having heard it for ten times, the other bygroup (b) of 11 subjects who only heard it oncebut were asked to reproduce the phrase as sungphrase. Their output exhibited striking similarityas is shown in the graph below in average pitch.Figure 2This difference suggests that by focusing on theacoustic properties (or imitating the prosody) ofthe speech sentence one might produce the sungphrase (sung phrase is usually produced byexaggerating the acoustic features of thesentence, such as prolonged pitch stability). Thefollowing graphs show my calculation of themean speed of pitch change at a 0.01s intervalfor the two sentences from above, one fromgroup (a) and the other from group (c).Table 1Figure 1Meanwhile, there is striking difference betweenthe output of group (a) and group(c) who onlyheard the phrase once and were simply asked torepeat:Table 2It is evident from the data in the graph 1 and 2that the speed of pitch change in sung-like2