EXPRESS: Cross-Linguistic Effects of the Speech-to-Song Illusion in Speakers of Bangla and English.

Abstract

The speech-to-song illusion is a phenomenon in which the continuous repetition of a spoken utterance induces the listeners to perceive it as more song-like. Thus far, this perceptual transformation has been observed in mostly European languages, such as English; however, it is unclear whether the illusion is experienced by speakers of Bangla (Bengali), an Indo-Aryan language. The current study, therefore, investigates the illusion in 28 Bangla- and 31 English-speaking participants. The experiment consisted of a listening task in which participants were asked to rate their perception of repeating short speech stimuli on a scale from 1-5, where 1 = "sounds like speech" and 5 = "sounds like song". The stimuli were composed of English and Bangla utterances produced by two bilingual speakers. To account for possible group differences in music engagement, participants self-reported musical experience and also performed a rhythm discrimination task as an objective measure of non-verbal auditory sequence processing. Stimulus ratings were analysed with cumulative link mixed modelling. Overall, English- and Bangla-speaking participants rated the stimuli similarly and, in both groups, better performance in the rhythm discrimination task significantly predicted more song-like ratings beyond self-reported musical experience. An exploratory acoustic analysis revealed a role of harmonic ratio in the illusion for both language groups. These results demonstrate that the speech-to-song-illusion occurs for Bangla speakers to a similar extent as English speakers and that, across both groups, sensitivity to non-verbal auditory structure is positively correlated with susceptibility to this perceptual transformation.