Perception of relative pitch of sentence-length utterances

Differences in relative pitch have several linguistic uses, such as tone and dynamic intonational patterns. In addition, listeners are also sensitive to average pitch differences both within and across male and female speakers. While much research uses isolated syllables to investigate how well listeners can distinguish differences in pitch, this study focuses on listeners' ability to identify relative pitch differences across whole utterances. Listeners are presented with 28 items of the same sentence spoken by female politicians and are asked to rate how low or high the pitch of the utterance is on a 5-point scale. Results indicate that listeners use all steps of the scale to categorize the mean F0 of the stimuli (range: 130-250 Hz) and not a "high/medium/low" system or one in which only the extremes are categorized as high or low.