Abstract
Vocal pitch, which involves not only F0 but also multiple covarying acoustic cues is central to linguistic perception and production at various levels of prosodic structure. Recent studies on language development have shown that differences in learners' musicality affect the F0 cue development in perception of sentence-level intonation or in prosodic realization of focus. This study aims to contribute toward a fuller understanding of the effect of musicality on linguistic pitch development via a close investigation of the relationship between musicality, age, and lexical tone production covering both F0 and spectral cues in children. Forty-three native Mandarin-speaking children between the ages of 4 and 6 years are recruited to participate in both a semi-spontaneous tone production task and a musicality test. For each age (4, 5, and 6 years) and musicality (below or above the median score of each age group) group, the contrastivity of the four tones is evaluated by performing automatic tone classification using three sets of acoustic cues (F0, spectral cues, and both). It has been found that higher musicality is associated with higher contrastivity of the tones produced at the age of 4 and 5 years, but not at the age of 6 years. These results suggest that musicality promotes earlier development of tone production only in earlier stages of prosodic development; by the age of 6 years, the musicality advantage in tone production subsides.
Highlights
Fundamental frequency (F0) or pitch is used at multiple levels of linguistic structure, such as lexical tones, focus marking, and prosodic phrasing
A more recent study on Dutch-speaking 4- to 10-year-olds’ prosodic production shows that higher musicality is positively correlated with a more adult-like prosodic realization of focus, though this correlation becomes weaker at older ages (Chen, 2016). These findings suggest a facilitating effect of musicality on the use of prosodic pitch cues over the course of language development
The current study aims to contribute toward a fuller understanding of the effect of musicality on linguistic pitch development via a close investigation of the relationship between musicality, age, and lexical tone production covering both F0 and spectral cues in children
Summary
Fundamental frequency (F0) or pitch (hereafter pitch) is used at multiple levels of linguistic structure, such as lexical tones, focus marking, and prosodic phrasing. The ability to process and produce pitch cues accurately is central to speech perception and production. It has long been known that people vary in their aptitudes for pitch-processing, depending on their so-called musicality (i.e., individual’s cognitive capability for music, shaped by both innate aptitude and musical training). Fall in neither the most advantaged nor the disadvantaged portions of the musicality spectrum; individuals’ musical processing abilities improve with age during childhood (Welch, 1998) and can be further developed through musical training and exposure (Besson et al, 2007). Among various musical cues associated with musicality, the pitch-processing aspect of musicality has received
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