Can you tell the difference between English and Chinese?

… from the pitch contours alone? It should be easy, right? Chinese is a tone language, English isn't, etc.

So try it…

I've chosen phrases at random from a published collection of Mandarin Broadcast News and a similar collection of English Broadcast News. Each audio file has been lowpass filtered via the command

sox –norm $f  low_"$f" sinc -300

This is not the only way to remove "segmental" information (vowels and consonants) while preserving prosodic information (pitch and timing), and it's probably not the best way to do this, but it's an easy and  commonly-used method.

There are eight audio clips. Listen to them and note for each one whether you think it's English or Chinese. I'd suggest using headphones if you don't have a good sound system connected to your computer, because the low frequencies involved are not well reproduced by small laptop speakers. This is a "forced choice" experiment, so give a clear answer ("English" or "Chinese") in each case. Don't overthink or overanalyze or go over the material multiple times — just listen once and say what comes to mind. If you're not sure, just guess.

OK, we've got 50-odd responses — that's enough for this simple and inadequately designed experiment… 

Along with each answer, give a number between 1 and 3 indicating how confident you are in your judgment, where 1 means "no clue, I'm just guessing", 2 means "I think it's X but I'm not sure", and 3 means "no question at all, it's X".

(1) Your browser does not support the audio element. (2) Your browser does not support the audio element. (3) Your browser does not support the audio element. (4) Your browser does not support the audio element. (5) Your browser does not support the audio element. (6) Your browser does not support the audio element. (7) Your browser does not support the audio element. (8) Your browser does not support the audio element.