Music melody perception in tone-language- and nontone-language speakers (original) (raw)

Perception of musical pitch and lexical tones by Mandarin-speaking musicians

Journal of The Acoustical Society of America, 2010

The relationship between music and language processing was explored in two perception experiments on the identification of musical notes and Mandarin tones. In the music task, Mandarin-speaking musicians were asked to identify musical notes of three timbres without a reference pitch. 72% of the musicians met the criterion for absolute pitch when an exact match was required, and 82% met the criterion when one-semitone errors were allowed. Accuracy of identification was negatively correlated with age of onset of musical training, and piano notes were identified more accurately than viola and pure tone stimuli. In the Mandarin task, the musicians were able to identify, beyond chance, brief Mandarin tone stimuli that were devoid of dynamic F0 information and cues commonly considered necessary for speaker normalization. Although F0 height detection was involved in both musical note and Mandarin tone identification, performances in the two tasks were not correlated. The putative link between absolute pitch and tone language experience was discussed.

Pitch perception in lexical tone and melody

2013

Music is frequently compared to language, both structurally and psychologically, but the cognitive relationship between the two is still not well understood. This review examines pitch, a salient acoustic property shared by language and music, in order to evaluate the state of knowledge regarding the effects of musical and linguistic experience on the other domain. Specifically, the linguistic property of lexical tone is discussed in relation to musical melody. Basic facts about lexical tone systems are described, along with factors relevant to their perception. Structural components of melody and their perception are discussed, and parallels are drawn between aspects of melodic and linguistic perception. Cases of interaction between linguistic and musical pitch perception are reviewed, and theoretical perspectives on their relationship are compared. A set of perceptual models are identified that generate hypotheses about shared perceptual properties, which have the potential to further explain and specify the mutual influence between music and language cognition.

Phonetic Dimensions of Tone Language Effects on Musical Melody Perception

2016

Delineating the relationship between music and language is crucial for understanding the function of both. A key feature shared by both systems is a reliance on pitch. Recent work involving lexical tone demonstrates that crossover of musical and linguistic perception is bidirectional, but the features driving this influence are not well defined. The present study attempts to link phonetic features of lexical tones to structural elements of melody (via a shared reliance on similar acoustic properties) by comparing melody discrimination among speakers of 2 tone languages (Mandarin and Yoruba) and 1 nontone language (English). Both tone language groups outperformed English speakers on dynamic aspects of melody (contour and interval), which are argued to resemble important cues to lexical tone perception (direction and slope) in these languages. Differences between Mandarin and Yoruba speakers suggest that language-to-music effects are not simply a tone/nontone distinction, but that specific tonal features of particular languages affect melody perception in slightly different ways. Differences between groups in response bias suggest the phonological structures of languages' tone systems may also affect music perception. Language and music are interesting to psychology because they have been claimed to be two of the few uniquely human abilities. Much has been made of both their similarities and differences, and despite the many ways in which language and music have been demonstrated to be modular, cases of overlap or influence between the two abound. Understanding this influence is key to understanding the function of each, and will perhaps lend more general insight into the architecture of the human perceptual system. This study focuses on crossover between language and music at the auditory or phonetic level, examining the use of pitch in music and lexical tone language. Recent evidence suggests that crossover effects between these domains are bidirectional (Bidelman, Hutka, & Moreno, 2013); musicianship influences the perception of tone, and tone language experience influences music perception. The experiment presented here aims to contribute additional evidence for the latter direction, as well as to go beyond already demonstrated effects by describing the nature of such crossover based on perceptual features of lexical tone and musical melody.

Language experience influences non-linguistic pitch perception

Following publication of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, evidence has accumulated for the influence of language experience on perception. There are thousands of languages in the world which make use of pitch patterns to construct words much as vowels and consonants are used, among which Mandarin (a.k.a. Putonghua) is a typical tone language. This study examines the effect of language experience (tone language experience vs. nontone language experience) on non-linguistic pitch perception. First, we show a significantly higher prevalence of absolute pitch among native tone-language-speaking music students than among nontone-language-speaking music students. Moreover, we show that language experience shapes the perception of tone sweeps, extending the influence of language prototypes from the linguistic domain to the nonlinguistic domain. Taken together, these results demonstrate that language experience affects auditory perception, and so provide evidence for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in the auditory modality.

Lexical tone perception in musicians and non-musicians

2005

It has been suggested that music and speech maintain entirely dissociable mental processing systems. The current study, however, provides evidence that there is an overlap in the processing of certain shared aspects of the two. This study focuses on fundamental frequency (pitch), which is an essential component of melodic units in music and lexical and/or intonational units in speech. We hypothesize that extensive experience with the processing of musical pitch can transfer to a lexical pitch-processing domain. To that end, we asked nine English-speaking musicians and nine Englishspeaking non-musicians to identify and discriminate the four lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese. The subjects performed significantly differently on both tasks; the musicians identified the tones with 89% accuracy and discriminated them with 87% accuracy, while the non-musicians identified them with only 69% accuracy and discriminated them with 71% accuracy. These results provide counter-evidence to the theory of dissociation between music and speech processing.

Evidence for Shared Cognitive Processing of Pitch in Music and Language

PLoS ONE, 2013

Language and music epitomize the complex representational and computational capacities of the human mind. Strikingly similar in their structural and expressive features, a longstanding question is whether the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms underlying these abilities are shared or distinct-either from each other or from other mental processes. One prominent feature shared between language and music is signal encoding using pitch, conveying pragmatics and semantics in language and melody in music. We investigated how pitch processing is shared between language and music by measuring consistency in individual differences in pitch perception across language, music, and three control conditions intended to assess basic sensory and domain-general cognitive processes. Individuals' pitch perception abilities in language and music were most strongly related, even after accounting for performance in all control conditions. These results provide behavioral evidence, based on patterns of individual differences, that is consistent with the hypothesis that cognitive mechanisms for pitch processing may be shared between language and music.

Finding the music of speech: Musical knowledge influences pitch processing in speech

Cognition, 2015

Few studies comparing music and language processing have adequately controlled for low-level acoustical differences, making it unclear whether differences in music and language processing arise from domain-specific knowledge, acoustic characteristics, or both. We controlled acoustic characteristics by using the speech-to-song illusion, which often results in a perceptual transformation to song after several repetitions of an utterance. Participants performed a samedifferent pitch discrimination task for the initial repetition (heard as speech) and the final repetition (heard as song). Better detection was observed for pitch changes that violated rather than conformed to Western musical scale structure, but only when utterances transformed to song, indicating that music-specific pitch representations were activated and influenced perception. This shows that music-specific processes can be activated when an utterance is heard as song, suggesting that the high-level status of a stimulus as either language or music can be behaviorally dissociated from low-level acoustic factors.

Effect of musical experience on tonal language perception

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2014

Both functional and structural overlap between musical experience and language learning ability have been discussed and debated in the psychology literature. Of interest in the study presented here is the relationship between tonal structures in music and in language. We tested the relationship between musical training and the ability to identify Mandarin tones in a group of non-Mandarin speakers. The dependent variable was the accuracy of tone identification in the mandarin phrases. A simple questionnaire was used to measure musical experience. Musical training and identification accuracy were related. Non-significant effects are discussed below.

The influence of language experience on categorical perception of pitch contours

Journal of Phonetics, 2010

Previous research on categorical perception of pitch contours has mainly considered the contrast between tone language and non-tone language listeners. This study investigates not only the influence of tone language vs. non-tone language experience (German vs. Chinese), but also the influence of different tone inventories (Mandarin tones vs. Cantonese tones), on the categorical perception of pitch contours. The results show that the positions of the identification boundaries do not differ significantly across the 3 groups of listeners, i.e., Mandarin, Cantonese, and German, but that the boundary widths do differ significantly between tone language (Mandarin and Cantonese) listeners and non-tone language (German) listeners, with broader boundary widths for non-tone language listeners. In the discrimination tasks, the German listeners exhibit only psychophysical boundaries, whereas Chinese listeners exhibit linguistic boundaries, and these linguistic boundaries are further shaped by the different tone inventories.

Tone language experience enhances sensitivity to melodic contour

2012

Abstract Lexical tones are perceived along several dimensions, including pitch height, direction, and slope. Melody is also factored into several dimensions, key, contour, and interval, argued to correspond to phonetic dimensions. Tone speakers are expected to possess enhanced sensitivity to musical properties corresponding to properties of their tonal inventories. Mandarin-and English-speaking non-musicians took a melody discrimination test.