Department of Linguistics, University of California, 3125 Campbell Hall, Box 951543, Los Angeles, California 90095-1543, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2012 Aug;132(2):1100-12. doi: 10.1121/1.4714351.
How are listeners able to identify whether the pitch of a brief isolated sample of an unknown voice is high or low in the overall pitch range of that speaker? Does the speaker's voice quality convey crucial information about pitch level? Results and statistical models of two experiments that provide answers to these questions are presented. First, listeners rated the pitch levels of vowels taken over the full pitch ranges of male and female speakers. The absolute f0 of the samples was by far the most important determinant of listeners' ratings, but with some effect of the sex of the speaker. Acoustic measures of voice quality had only a very small effect on these ratings. This result suggests that listeners have expectations about f0s for average speakers of each sex, and judge voice samples against such expectations. Second, listeners judged speaker sex for the same speech samples. Again, absolute f0 was the most important determinant of listeners' judgments, but now voice quality measures also played a role. Thus it seems that pitch level judgments depend on voice quality mostly indirectly, through its information about sex. Absolute f0 is the most important information for deciding both pitch level and speaker sex.
听众如何能够识别一个未知声音的短暂孤立样本的音高是高还是低，处于该说话者的整体音高范围内？说话者的音质是否传达了关于音高水平的关键信息？本文介绍了两个实验的结果和统计模型，这些实验提供了对这些问题的答案。首先，听众对取自男性和女性说话者全音域的元音的音高水平进行了评分。样本的绝对 f0 是听众评分的最重要决定因素，但说话者的性别也有一定影响。音质的声学测量对这些评分的影响很小。这一结果表明，听众对每个性别平均说话者的 f0 有一定的预期，并根据这些预期来判断语音样本。其次，听众对相同的语音样本进行了说话者性别的判断。同样，绝对 f0 是听众判断的最重要决定因素，但现在音质测量也起了作用。因此，音高水平的判断似乎主要是通过其性别信息间接地依赖于音质。绝对 f0 是决定音高水平和说话者性别的最重要信息。
