Native Experience with a Tone Language Enhances Pitch Discrimination and the Timing of Neural Responses to Pitch Change

Emily M Stanley,Shalini Narayana,Peter Q Pfordresher,Ryan J Giuliano,Nicole Y Y Wicha

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00146

Abstract

Native tone language experience has been linked with alterations in the production and perception of pitch in language, as well as with the brain response to linguistic and non-linguistic tones. Here we use two experiments to address whether these changes apply to the discrimination of simple pitch changes and pitch intervals. Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from native Mandarin speakers and a control group during a same/different task with pairs of pure tones differing only in pitch height, and with pure tone pairs differing only in interval distance. Behaviorally, Mandarin speakers were more accurate than controls at detecting both pitch and interval changes, showing a sensitivity to small pitch changes and interval distances that was absent in the control group. Converging evidence from ERPs obtained during the same tasks revealed an earlier response to change relative to no-change trials in Mandarin speakers, as well as earlier differentiation of trials by change direction relative to controls. These findings illustrate the cross-domain influence of language experience on the perception of pitch, suggesting that the native use of tonal pitch contours in language leads to a general enhancement in the acuity of pitch representations.

Highlights

There is increasing evidence that native experience with a tone language changes the perceptual and categorization abilities of listeners for both linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli (i.e., Deutsch, et al, 2006; Krishnan et al, 2009)
Participants Thirty-three right-handed adults1,2 grouped as native tone language speakers and a control group were paid for their participation
In this case a hit corresponded to the correct detection of a pitch change, while a false alarm corresponded to a response of “different” on a no-change trial

Summary

Introduction

There is increasing evidence that native experience with a tone language changes the perceptual and categorization abilities of listeners for both linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli (i.e., Deutsch, et al, 2006; Krishnan et al, 2009). Speakers of Mandarin, where the lexical meaning of a word depends on the overall pitch height as well as change in pitch (melodic contour) in production, are better at discriminating pitch intervals compared to native speakers of English (Pfordresher and Brown, 2009; Hove et al, 2010), a language that uses tone mainly to convey suprasegmental or prosodic information concerning stress or sentence structure (Cruttenden, 1997; Yip, 2002; Gussenhoven, 2004) It is unclear whether corresponding temporal dynamics of the neural processes underlying pitch perception facilitate this advantage, and whether or not this advantage for tone language speakers transfers to simple non-linguistic stimuli, such as pure tones. If pitch contrasts in speech are processed by general auditory mechanisms (Bregman et al, 1990), tone speakers may demonstrate enhanced pitch processing abilities for non-linguistic stimuli, such as simple pure tones

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Conclusion