Prominence and Expectation in Speech and Music Through the Lens of Pitch Processing

Speech and music reflect extraordinary aspects of human cognitive abilities. Pitch, as an important parameter in the auditory domain, has been the focus of previous research on the relations between speech and music. The present study continues this line of research by focusing on two aspects of pitch processing: pitch prominence and melodic expectation. Specifically, we examined the perceived boundary of prominence for focus/accent in speech and music, plus the comparison between the pitch expectation patterns of music and speech. Speech (Mandarin Chinese) and music stimuli were created with different interval steps that increased from 1 semitone to 12 semitones from the third to the fourth word/note of a sentence/melody. The results showed that ratings of both accent/focus and expectation/surprise increased with increasing semitone distance from the baseline (though this pattern was mixed with tonal stability profiles for the melodies). Nevertheless, the perceived boundary of prominence was different for music and speech, with the boundary for detecting prominence in speech higher than that in music. Expectation also showed different patterns for speech and music. The results thus favor the suggestion that speech prosody and music melody tend to require specialized pitch patterns unique to their own respective communication purposes.