Terhardt, E. (1987). Psychophysics of auditory signal processing and the role of pitch in speech. In: The Psychophysics of Speech Perception (Schouten, M.E.H., ed.), Nijhoff, Dordrecht, 271-283
This paper discusses the psychophysical foundations of speech perception. In particular, the role of pitch is considered in perception of vowels. In experiments it was found that vowel identification and vowel quality are essentially independent of fundamental frequency of natural vowels. When the partials of the exciting spectrum are inharmonic, and when random noise is used, both identification and quality are significantly reduced.