Abstract
This study explores the influence of bilingualism on the cognitive processing of language and music. Specifically, we investigate how infants learning a non-tone language perceive linguistic and musical pitch and how bilingualism affects cross-domain pitch perception. Dutch monolingual and bilingual infants of 8–9 months participated in the study. All infants had Dutch as one of the first languages. The other first languages, varying among bilingual families, were not tone or pitch accent languages. In two experiments, infants were tested on the discrimination of a lexical (N = 42) or a violin (N = 48) pitch contrast via a visual habituation paradigm. The two contrasts shared identical pitch contours but differed in timbre. Non-tone language learning infants did not discriminate the lexical contrast regardless of their ambient language environment. When perceiving the violin contrast, bilingual but not monolingual infants demonstrated robust discrimination. We attribute bilingual infants’ heightened sensitivity in the musical domain to the enhanced acoustic sensitivity stemming from a bilingual environment. The distinct perceptual patterns between language and music and the influence of acoustic salience on perception suggest processing diversion and association in the first year of life. Results indicate that the perception of music may entail both shared neural network with language processing, and unique neural network that is distinct from other cognitive functions.
Highlights
Language and music are universal human faculties that involve high-level cognitive functions
Do young infants perceive the same pitch contrast differently when the pitch contours are embedded in language and in music? Does growing up in a bilingual environment alter infant language and music perception? This paper investigates 8- to 9-month-old infants’ perception of linguistic and musical contrasts differing in pitch, theassociation between the two cognitive functions, and how variations in the exposure of one domain may alter the perception of the other in the first year of life
The main effect of the phase change (the difference between the two last trials in Sensitivity to native and even non-native lexical pitch contrasts is maintained in tone-learning infants at 9 months (Yeung et al 2013)
Summary
Language and music are universal human faculties that involve high-level cognitive functions. Non-tone language learning infants, sensitive to lexical pitch contrasts at birth (Nazzi et al 1998), no longer discriminate most lexical pitch contrasts 9 months after birth (Harrison 2000; Mattock et al 2008; Yeung et al 2013). This perceptual pattern is not absolute, since perceptual attunement is considered to be an ‘‘optimal’’ rather than a ‘‘critical’’, clear-cut process (Werker and Tees 2005). Non-tone language learning infants retain sensitivity to acoustically salient lexical pitch contrasts even after 9 months of age (Liu and Kager 2014), a pattern that extends to adulthood (Chen et al 2015), reflecting the influence of acoustic salience on lexical pitch perception
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