The perceptual salience of melodic variation : contour shape and peak height

This paper describes an experiment that was run in order to determine the relative salience of two kinds of melodic variation: variation in the shape of contours belonging to the same intonation pattern or in the height of accent-lending pitch peaks. The outcome suggests that variation of contour shape is perceptually more salient than variation of peak height. In addition, it was noticed that variation of peak height in the first pitch movement is more conspicuous than that in the second. Finally, it is observed that diverging top lines are perceptually more salient as different from toplines that parallel the baseline than converging ones.