ANOVA designs were conducted to test the perception data for the effects of alignment, subject group, and pitch height. The results show the major asymmetry in the perception of pitch peak alignment across the two subject groups: it is strongly significant (at & < 0.001) for stimuli identification by Russian subjects, but is insignificant for the Japanese subjects.

The results of the experimental stimuli identification by subjects are represented in graphic form in Figure 2 (panels a-d). First, as can be seen from the graphs, we can find some common patterning in the perception by Japanese and Russian subjects: for both groups pitch height affects the perception: lower pitch peak height yields predominantly declarative judgments by both groups of speakers (panels a, b) whereas higher pitch yields an increase in the percentage of non-declarative judgments (panels c, d).

Second, the effect of pitch peak alignment on the perceived sentence type is strongly asymmetrical. Japanese subjects perceive all the low-pitched stimuli as declarative irrespective of their alignment, and react to the rightward shift of pitch peak alignment in higher pitched stimuli by an increase of exclamatory judgments. For Russian subjects the rightward shift of pitch peak alignment in low pitched stimuli causes a decrease of declarative and an increase of interrogative judgment.

Third, with the change of pitch height, we find symmetry distortion in the perception of pitch peak alignment for Russian subjects, whereby the effect of alignment is stronger for the set of higher-pitched stimuli where we observe a clear categorical shift (located close to the accented vowel offset) in perception from predominantly interrogative to predominantly exclamatory.

Figure 1: Manipulated parameters of pitch peak height and alignment.