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Pace, emotion, and language tonality on speech-to-song illusion
Author(s)
Date Issued
2018
Citation
Leung, C., & Zhou, D. (2018 Jun 21). Pace, emotion, and language tonality on speech-to-song illusion. SCAP 2018, Singapore.
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
The speech-to-song illusion indicates a blurred boundary between the perception of speech
and the perception of song. It is a type of auditory illusion that the repetition of a part of a
sentence would change people’s perception tendency from speech-like to song-like. The
study aims to examine how pace, emotion, and language tonality affect people’s experience
of the speech-to-song illusion. It uses a between-subject (Pace: fast, normal, vs. slow) and
within-subject (Emotion: positive, negative, vs. neutral; language tonality: tonal language vs.
non-tonal language) design. Sixty Hong Kong college students were randomly assigned to
one of the three conditions characterized by pace. They listened to 12 trials of different
sentences with repetitions of a short excerpt and rated their subjective feeling of how they
think the presented phrase sounded like on a five-point Likert-scale. Paired-sample t-tests and
repeated measures ANOVAs were used to analyse the data. The findings support previous
studies that repetition had a strong role in leading to the speech-to-song illusion by semantic
satiation effect. It also provides new insights that a fast speech pace could result in perceptual
change. Neither emotion nor language tonality show a statistically significant influence on
the speech-to-song illusion. The current research adds to the body of knowledge about
auditory perception that a repetitive speech in a fast pace changes our perception to
perceiving it as song-like. This suggests that the perception of sound is in a continuum and
that language and music are not in a dichotomy. The research also facilitates the
understanding of song production in which speech can turn into music by having repetitive
phrases and to be played in a relatively fast pace.
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