Variations in the perception of lexical pitch accents and the correlations with individuals' autistic traits

The present study examined if individual listeners' perceptual variations were associated with their cognitive characteristics indexed by the Autistic Spectrum Quotient (AQ). This study first investigated the perception of the lexical pitch accent contrast in the Kyungsang Korean currently undergoing a sound change, and then tested if listeners' perceptual variations were correlated with their AQ scores. Eighteen Kyungsang listeners in their 20s participated in the perception experiment where they identified two contrastive accent words for auditory stimuli systematically varying F0 scaling and timing properties; the participants then completed the AQ questionnaire. In the results, the acoustic parameters reporting reduced phonetic differences across accent contrasts for younger Kyungsang generation played a reliable role in perceiving the HH word from HL, suggesting the discrepancy between the perception and the production in the context of sound change. This study also observed that individuals' perceptual variations were negatively correlated with their AQ sub scores. The present findings suggested that the sound change might appear differently between production and perception with a different time course, and deviant percepts could be explained by individuals' cognitive measure.