An approach to a perceptual analysis on pitch threshold in central Mexican Spanish

Abstract

This article reviews and expands the experiment reported by Pamies, Fernández Planas, Martínez Celdrán, Ortega & Amorós (2001) which aimed to establish a perception threshold where a tonal difference may reflect significant differences in the Spanish of Spain, as well as to harmonize the methodologies of previous works and the study of tone separately, in order to avoid biases that could potentially affect the results. The present investigation adopted these same objectives. The analysis in this article was performed from an experiment designed to investigate the perception of tonal differences in the Spanish language spoken in central Mexico. In addition, different statistical methods, such as the correlation between two variables, were used to find the pitch perception threshold. The results suggest that this threshold is around 1.5 semitones, but additional elements should also be considered, such as duration and intensity.