Abstract
The relationship between music and speech processing is of great interest. Lexical tones, contrastive pitch-modulation patterns at the word level, are an ideal tool to explore these relations. Previous studies suggest that musicians exhibit an advantage in discriminating lexical tones. The current study aims to explore whether having extensive musical training is associated with the ability to form robust lexical tone categories given highly variable natural speech tokens. A continuum of pitch contours was created with Mandarin Tone 2 and Tone 3 as the endpoints (see Zhao, Wright, & Kuhl ASA abstract). First, 20 monolingual English musicians and 20 monolingual English non-musicians completed identification and discrimination tasks that established individuals' perceptual boundaries on the continuum. Then, half of the musicians and half of the non-musicians were randomly assigned to an 8-session perceptual training procedure. Lastly, all subjects completed identification and discrimination tasks both with old and new stimuli to examine changes in perceptual boundaries and generalization. Results will be considered in terms of theories relating speech and music processing. [Research supported by NIH and NSF.]
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