Abstract
It is considered that absolute pitch [AP] judgments require the associations between categories of musical pitch and their labels, but the role of phonetic labels on categorical perception has not been investigated well. In this study, absolute pitch identification was tested to examine how the phonetic labels mediate the association between the categorization and pitch. In the ``fixed doh'' solmization, the white key pitches have simple, single syllabic phonetic labels, while the black key pitches do not. Accordingly, phonetic encoding should be different between the white key and black key pitches. In order to clarify the influence of this difference on perceptual representation of pitch categories, this study compared error rates of the white key pitches to the adjacent tones (i.e. white key-or black key pitches). As a result, AP possessors made more errors to the black key pitches than to the white key pitches. Also, AP possessors tended to make more confusion errors between pitches which had similar phonetic labels in a condition considered to activate a speech mode. These results suggested that AP possessors encoded pitch depending on the phonetic labels.
