Pace, emotion, and language tonality on speech-to-song illusion

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.