Musicology Department, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Psychol Res. 2020 Jul;84(5):1451-1459. doi: 10.1007/s00426-018-1135-z. Epub 2019 Jan 9.
The Speech-to-Song Illusion (STS) refers to a dramatic shift in our perception of short speech fragments which, when repeatedly presented, may start to sound-like song. Anecdotally, once it is perceived as a song, it is difficult to unhear the melody of a speech fragment, and such temporal dynamics of the STS illusion has theoretical implications. The goal of the current study is to capture this temporal effect. In our experiment, speech fragments that initially did not elicit the STS illusion were manipulated to have increasingly stable F0 contours to strengthen the perceived 'song-likeness' of a fragment. Over the course of trials, the speech fragments with manipulated contours were repeatedly presented within blocks of decreasing, increasing, or random orders of F0 manipulations. Results showed that a presentation order where participants first heard the sentence with the maximum amount of F0 manipulations (decreasing condition) resulted in participants continuously giving higher overall song-like ratings than other presentation orders (increasing or random conditions). Our results thus capture the commonly reported phenomenon that it is hard to 'unhear' the illusion once a speech segment has been perceived as song.
言语-歌曲错觉（STS）是指我们对短语音片段的感知发生戏剧性变化，这些片段在反复呈现时，可能开始听起来像歌曲。有传闻说，一旦被感知为歌曲，就很难不再听到语音片段的旋律，STS 错觉的这种时间动态具有理论意义。本研究的目的是捕捉这种时间效应。在我们的实验中，最初不会引起 STS 错觉的语音片段被操纵，使其具有越来越稳定的基频轮廓，以增强片段的“歌曲般”感知。在试验过程中，具有操纵轮廓的语音片段在 F0 操纵的递减、递增或随机顺序的块内重复呈现。结果表明，参与者首先听到 F0 操纵量最大的句子的呈现顺序（递减条件）导致参与者持续给出比其他呈现顺序（递增或随机条件）更高的整体歌曲般评分。因此，我们的结果捕捉到了一个常见的现象，即一旦语音片段被感知为歌曲，就很难“不再听到”错觉。
