The Relationship Between Pitch Discrimination and Fundamental Frequency Variation: Effects of Singing Status and Vocal Hyperfunction.
Allison S Aaron, Defne Abur, Kalei P Volk and 3 others
PMID 36754684WHAT IT FOUND
Among non-singers with typical voices, women who were worse at detecting small pitch changes had more variable pitch in connected speech.
Singers and women with vocal hyperfunction showed no such link.
Key findings
01Pitch discrimination and pitch variation were related in non-singers with typical voices, but not in singers or people with vocal hyperfunction.
02For non-singers with typical voices, worse pitch discrimination was associated with greater pitch variation during connected speech.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study was correlational, so it cannot show that pitch discrimination caused pitch variation or that training perception would change voice production. Pitch discrimination was measured at the phoneme level, while pitch variation was measured at the sentence level, so the two tasks did not match. Pitch variation was measured during a reading passage, not spontaneous speech, so it may not reflect everyday conversation. The singer groups were younger than the non-singer groups, and age may affect pitch perception and production. Only female speakers were included. Some pitch discrimination data had been reported previously. The study did not collect details of singers' musical training.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the correlation as evidence that poor pitch discrimination causes greater pitch variation. The relationship was found only in non-singers with typical voices and was not found in singers or people with vocal hyperfunction. This study did not test treatment.