It has been suggested that over 75000 years ago all humans spoke one language, whereby the spread of languages was happening from the west to the east (Aitchinson, 1996). As the languages were diverging, a gradual distortion of symmetry occurred in copying patterns. At every linguistic level, we can therefore expect a certain degree of similarity, and of difference across in any pair of languages. This experiment shows that pitch height perception patterns are transferred across languages, whereas some other parameter perception (such as pitch peak alignment) can be more language-specific. The difference in the effect of the pitch peak alignment on the categorization of sentence type can be explained by the differences in the customary sentence type/pitch pattern mapping in Russian and Japanese (Makarova, 2000).

We can also see how within one language, at a higher perceptual pressure (a higher pitch peak), the symmetry is distorted more than at a lower pressure (a lower pitch peak).

                        Figure 2. Perception of stimuli by Japanese and Russian subjects