Effects of musical ear training on lexical tone perception

Evan D Bradley,Janet G Van Hell

doi:10.3765/plsa.v1i0.3640

Abstract

The effect of short term musical experience on lexical tone perception was examined by administering four hours of daily musical ear training to non-tone language speakers. After training, participants showed some improvement in a tone labeling task, but not a tone discrimination task; however, this improvement did not differ reliably from controls indicating that short-term musical training is thus far not able to replicate language effects observed among lifelong musicians, but some linguistic differences between musicians and nonmusicians may likely be due to experience, rather than individual differences or other factors.

Highlights

Musicians perceive pitch differently from others, which is reflected in their perception, production, and learning of lexical tones (Bradley, 2013)
Musicianship has been argued to change linguistic pitch perception, but cross-sectional evidence remains circumstantial, because music– language studies typically compare musicians with many years of training to those with little to no formal training. It remains poorly established how what music skill level or degree of training is required to see differences in linguistic pitch perception, but differences likely arise from a combination of explicit training, implicit learning, and individual aptitudes and personalities (Corrigall, Schellenberg, & Misura, 2013)
Neural differences associated with musical experience suggest that musical training could be harnessed for non-musical gains (Kraus & Chandrasekaran, 2010; Patel, 2011)

Summary

Introduction

Musicians perceive pitch differently from others, which is reflected in their perception, production, and learning of lexical tones (Bradley, 2013). Musicianship has been argued to change linguistic pitch perception, but cross-sectional evidence remains circumstantial, because music– language studies typically compare musicians with many years of training to those with little to no formal training. It remains poorly established how what music skill level or degree of training is required to see differences in linguistic pitch perception, but differences likely arise from a combination of explicit training, implicit learning, and individual aptitudes and personalities (Corrigall, Schellenberg, & Misura, 2013). This training involved production, as well as perception, but it was the only rhythmic task available in EarMaster which does not require the participant to read musical notation. The test contained eight blocks of 24 trials (192 total); four blocks had a single speaker (low-variability) and four had two speakers (highvariability)

Tone Comparison Task

Results & Discussion

Conclusions