Perception of pitch in glottalizations of varying duration by German listeners

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that glottalization is not necessarily perceived as lower pitch but that pitch perception in glottalization can be influenced by the different size of prosodic domains relevant in the native language of the listener. Speakers of intonation languages were influenced by the preceding pitch context when judging the pitch of longer creaky voice stretches, while speakers of pitch-accent or tone languages were not. The current study investigates pitch perception by German listeners in glottalized stretches of speech whose duration varied along a 10-step continuum. We found that the duration of the glottalized stretches affected the categorization of the stimuli, and that the German listeners were not influenced by the preceding pitch context, unlike in a previous study on longer stretches of glottalization of constant duration. Possibly shorter stretches of glottalization are interpreted as segmental word-boundary phenomena rather than as intonation.