Abstract
PurposeTo investigate if, regardless of language background (tonal or non-tonal), musicians may show stronger CP than non-musicians; To examine if native speakers of English (English or non-tonal musicians henceforth) or Mandarin Chinese (Mandarin or tonal musicians henceforth) can better accommodate multiple functions of the same acoustic cue and if musicians’ sensitivity to pitch of lexical tones comes at the cost of slower processing.MethodEnglish and Mandarin Musicians and non-musicians performed a categorical identification and a discrimination task on rising and falling continua of fundamental frequency on two vowels with 9 duration values.ResultsNon-tonal musicians exhibited significantly stronger categorical perception of pitch contour than non-tonal non-musicians. However, tonal musicians did not consistently perceive the two types of pitch directions more categorically than tonal non-musicians. Both tonal and non-tonal musicians also benefited more from increasing stimulus duration in processing pitch changes than non-musicians and they generally require less time for pitch processing. Musicians were also more sensitive to intrinsic F0 in pitch perception and differences of pitch types.ConclusionThe effect of musical training strengthens categorical perception more consistently in non-tonal speakers than tonal speakers. Overall, musicians benefit more from increased stimulus duration, due perhaps to their greater sensitivity to temporal information, thus allowing them to be better at forming a more robust auditory representation and matching sounds to internalized memory templates. Musicians also attended more to acoustic details such as intrinsic F0 and pitch types in pitch processing, and yet, overall, their categorization of pitch was not compromised by traces of these acoustic details from their auditory short-term working memory. These findings may lead to a better understanding of pitch perception deficits in special populations, particularly among individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Highlights
The link between music and language has been a subject of great interest among researchers from various disciplines, and evidence suggesting a connection between musical abilities and phonetic processing skills is growing [1]
This study investigates the effects of musical training in improving efficiency of pitch processing, strengthening categorical perception and enhancing factors interacting with pitch processing
We found that non-tonal musicians showed stronger categorical perception of pitch directions, whereas tonal musicians did not consistently show the same pattern
Summary
The link between music and language has been a subject of great interest among researchers from various disciplines, and evidence suggesting a connection between musical abilities and phonetic processing skills is growing [1]. It is found that brainstem encoding of Mandarin Tones 1, 2 and 3 were more faithful and robust among amateur musicians than non-musicians despite not having prior exposure to Mandarin [12] This finding is intriguing in so far as it is consistent with what is reported for native Mandarin listeners who have extensive exposure to lexical pitch [13]. According to [14], even though brainstem representation of musical pitches among both Mandarin listeners and English-speaking musicians are stronger in comparison to English-speaking-non-musicians, neither Mandarin listeners nor non-musicians were as accurate as musicians in discriminating musical pitch in behavioral tasks From these results, the authors inferred that “sensory-level enhancement of musical pitch information yields cognitive-level perceptual benefits only when that information is behaviorally relevant to the listener” It is conjectured that musical training may improve representations of auditory objects, network control and mapping of sounds to memory templates, potentially leading to musicians’ advantage in categorical perception of speech [15]
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