Order of presentation asymmetry in intonational contour discrimination in English.

Abstract

In the work of Hwang et al. (2007), native English speakers showed overall poor accuracy in distinguishing initially rising versus level (e.g., L*L*H- H*L-L% vs L*L*L- H*L-L%) or initially falling versus level (e.g., H*H*L- H*L-L% vs H*H*H- H*L-L%) contour contrasts on English phrases in an AX discrimination task. Results not reported in that paper found that it was easier to discriminate when a more complex F0 contour occurred second than when it occurred first. Several orders of presentation effects in the perception of intonation have been reported (e.g., L. Morton (1997); S. Lintfert (2003); Cummins et al. (2006)] but no satisfying account has been provided. This study investigated these asymmetries more systematically. The order effect was significant for falling-level contrast pairs: pairs with a more complex F0 contour last were discriminated more easily than the reverse order. Rising versus level contrasts showed a similar tendency. The results thus extend intonational discrimination asymmetries to these additional contours. They suggest that the cause of the asymmetries may depend more on F0 complexity than on F0 peak.