Speech versus nonspeech in pitch memory

Abstract

The memory trace of the pitch sensation induced by a standard tone (S) can be strongly degraded by subsequently intervening sounds (I). Deutsch [Science 168, 1604-1605 (1970)] suggested that the degradation is much weaker when the I sounds are words than when they are tones. In Deutsch's study, however, the pitch relations between S and the I words were not controlled. The first experiment reported here was similar to that of Deutsch except that the speech and nonspeech stimuli used as I sounds were matched in pitch. The speech stimuli were monosyllabic words derived from recordings of a real voice, whereas the nonspeech stimuli were harmonic complex tones with a flat spectral profile. These two kinds of I sound were presented at a variable pitch distance (delta-pitch) from the S tone. In a same/different paradigm, S had to be compared with a tone presented 6 s later; this comparison tone could be either identical to S or shifted in pitch by +/- 75 cents. The nature of the I sounds (spoken words versus tones) affected discrimination performance, but markedly less than did delta-pitch. Performance was better when delta-pitch was large than when it was small, for the speech as well as nonspeech I sounds. In a second experiment, the S sounds and comparison sounds were spoken words instead of tones. The differences to be detected were restricted to shifts in fundamental frequency (and thus pitch), the other acoustic attributes of the words being left unchanged. Again, discrimination performance was positively related to delta-pitch. This time, the nature of the I sounds (words versus tones) had no significant effect. Overall, the results suggest that, in auditory short-term memory, the pitch of speech sounds is not stored differently from the pitch of nonspeech sounds.

Functional architecture of verbal and tonal working memory: An FMRI study

“…Salame and Baddeley [1989] showed that vocal music interfered more strongly with phonological short-term memory than instrumental music, supporting the assumption of two independent WM systems for verbal and tonal stimuli [Salame and Baddeley, 1989]. On the other hand, results by Semal et al [1996] suggest that the pitch of speech sounds is not stored differently from the pitch of nonspeech sounds in WM. In addition, Iwanaga and Itoh [2002] reported that instrumental as well as vocal music interfered with a verbal WM task, and Chan et al [1998] observed that musical training increases the performance during a verbal WM task, suggesting rather overlapping neural resources for verbal and tonal WM.…”

Musicians' and nonmusicians' short-term memory for verbal and musical sequences: Comparing phonological similarity and pitch proximity

“…Musicians relied more on a combination of encoding techniques (either dual or multiple), including auditory (tone sound), verbal (labeling tones or contour patterns), and tactile (playing an imaginary instrument) encoding, whereas nonmusicians relied suggest that acoustic similarity impacts upon nonmusicians' immediate serial recall of both verbal and tonal pitch materials. This correspondence suggests support for a degree of shared storage in short-term memory (Salamé & Baddeley, 1989;Semal et al, 1996). It is still possible to postulate the existence of separate stores for verbal and pitch sequences (Berz, 1995;Deutsch, 1970;Pechmann & Mohr, 1992) but with the caveat that they operate using similar principles (i.e., storage of pitch sounds).…”

“…Deutsch (1970) found that irrelevant tones disrupted performance on tone recognition, but that irrelevant speech materials had little if any detrimental effect. Since that study however, several authors have reported a significant effect of background speech and music on memory for musical sounds (D. M. Jones, Macken, & Harries, 1997;Pechmann & Mohr, 1992;Semal & Demany, 1991, 1993Semal, Demany, Ueda, & Hallé, 1996). Semal et al concluded that the pitch dimension, whether it be music based or speech based, is the element that is commonly disruptive to both verbal and musical processing in short-term memory.…”

Updating and feature overwriting in short-term memory for timbre

“…Although prior explanations of interference have advocated interitem confusion (e.g., Deutsch, 1984;Ruusuvirta et al, 2008), grouping (e.g., Jones et al, 1997), or general trace distortion (e.g., Semal et al, 1996) as the underlying causal mechanisms, TMM hypothesizes that interference results from feature overwriting and updating (McKeown & Wellsted, 2009;Mercer & McKeown, 2010). To test this possibility, listeners compared standard and comparison tones over a 10-sec interval.…”

“…Intuitively, it would appear that perceptually similar distractors can blur the memory of the standard, thereby distorting the accuracy of the trace (Pechmann & Mohr, 1992;Semal, Demany, Ueda, & Hallé, 1996), and Ruusuvirta et al (2002) have argued that the interfering tones bias the representation of the existing memory toward the frequency of the interfering event. Building on these ideas, Ruusuvirta et al (2008) asserted that interference is a consequence of interitem confusion.…”