Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London.
Department of Psychology, Tufts University.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2018 Jun;147(6):888-904. doi: 10.1037/xge0000455.
In the "speech-to-song illusion," certain spoken phrases are heard as highly song-like when isolated from context and repeated. This phenomenon occurs to a greater degree for some stimuli than for others, suggesting that particular cues prompt listeners to perceive a spoken phrase as song. Here we investigated the nature of these cues across four experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to rate how song-like spoken phrases were after each of eight repetitions. Initial ratings were correlated with the consistency of an underlying beat and within-syllable pitch slope, while rating change was linked to beat consistency, within-syllable pitch slope, and melodic structure. In Experiment 2, the within-syllable pitch slope of the stimuli was manipulated, and this manipulation changed the extent to which participants heard certain stimuli as more musical than others. In Experiment 3, the extent to which the pitch sequences of a phrase fit a computational model of melodic structure was altered, but this manipulation did not have a significant effect on musicality ratings. In Experiment 4, the consistency of intersyllable timing was manipulated, but this manipulation did not have an effect on the change in perceived musicality after repetition. Our methods provide a new way of studying the causal role of specific acoustic features in the speech-to-song illusion via subtle acoustic manipulations of speech, and show that listeners can rapidly (and implicitly) assess the degree to which nonmusical stimuli contain musical structure. (PsycINFO Database Record
在“言语-歌曲错觉”中，某些孤立于语境之外并重复的口语短语听起来非常像歌曲。这种现象在某些刺激下比其他刺激更为明显，这表明特定的线索促使听众将口语短语感知为歌曲。在这里，我们通过四个实验研究了这些线索的性质。在实验 1 中，参与者被要求在每个短语重复 8 次后对其歌曲相似度进行评分。初始评分与潜在节奏的一致性和音节内音高斜率有关，而评分变化与节奏一致性、音节内音高斜率和旋律结构有关。在实验 2 中，我们操纵了刺激的音节内音高斜率，这种操纵改变了参与者听到某些刺激比其他刺激更具音乐性的程度。在实验 3 中，我们改变了一个短语的音序是否符合旋律结构的计算模型，但是这种操纵对音乐性评分没有显著影响。在实验 4 中，我们操纵了音节间节奏的一致性，但这种操纵对重复后感知音乐性的变化没有影响。我们的方法提供了一种通过对言语进行微妙的声学操纵来研究特定声学特征在言语-歌曲错觉中的因果作用的新方法，并表明听众可以快速（和隐式地）评估非音乐性刺激中包含的音乐结构的程度。
