Tone Language Speakers and Musicians Share Enhanced Perceptual and Cognitive Abilities for Musical Pitch: Evidence for Bidirectionality between the Domains of Language and Music

Gavin M Bidelman,Sylvain Moreno,Stefanie Hutka,Joel Snyder

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060676

Gavin M Bidelman, Sylvain Moreno + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0060676

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Abstract

Psychophysiological evidence suggests that music and language are intimately coupled such that experience/training in one domain can influence processing required in the other domain. While the influence of music on language processing is now well-documented, evidence of language-to-music effects have yet to be firmly established. Here, using a cross-sectional design, we compared the performance of musicians to that of tone-language (Cantonese) speakers on tasks of auditory pitch acuity, music perception, and general cognitive ability (e.g., fluid intelligence, working memory). While musicians demonstrated superior performance on all auditory measures, comparable perceptual enhancements were observed for Cantonese participants, relative to English-speaking nonmusicians. These results provide evidence that tone-language background is associated with higher auditory perceptual performance for music listening. Musicians and Cantonese speakers also showed superior working memory capacity relative to nonmusician controls, suggesting that in addition to basic perceptual enhancements, tone-language background and music training might also be associated with enhanced general cognitive abilities. Our findings support the notion that tone language speakers and musically trained individuals have higher performance than English-speaking listeners for the perceptual-cognitive processing necessary for basic auditory as well as complex music perception. These results illustrate bidirectional influences between the domains of music and language.

Highlights

A rapidly growing body of empirical evidence suggests that brain mechanisms governing music and language processing interact and might share an important link with respect to their underlying neurophysiological processing [1,2,3,4,5]
Musicians demonstrate perceptual enhancements in a myriad of language-specific abilities including phonological processing [10], verbal memory [11,12] and verbal intelligence [13], formant and voice pitch discrimination [14], sensitivity to prosodic cues [15], detecting durational cues in speech [16], degraded speech perception [14,17], second language proficiency [18,19], and lexical tone identification [20,21,22]. These perceptual advantages are corroborated by electrophysiological evidence demonstrating that both cortical [23,24,25,26,27,28] and even subcortical [3,29,30,31] brain circuitry altered by long-term music training facilitates the sensory-perceptual and cognitive control of speech information
An omnibus ANOVA revealed that Corsi working memory (WM) span differed between groups [F(2,51) = 4.62, p = 0.014, g2partial = 0.15]

Summary

Introduction

A rapidly growing body of empirical evidence suggests that brain mechanisms governing music and language processing interact and might share an important link with respect to their underlying neurophysiological processing [1,2,3,4,5]. Musicians demonstrate perceptual enhancements in a myriad of language-specific abilities including phonological processing [10], verbal memory [11,12] and verbal intelligence [13], formant and voice pitch discrimination [14], sensitivity to prosodic cues [15], detecting durational cues in speech [16], degraded speech perception [14,17], second language proficiency [18,19], and lexical tone identification [20,21,22] These perceptual advantages are corroborated by electrophysiological evidence demonstrating that both cortical [23,24,25,26,27,28] and even subcortical [3,29,30,31] brain circuitry altered by long-term music training facilitates the sensory-perceptual and cognitive control of speech information. Musicians’ brain-behavior benefits for speech and language are, presumably, mediated by a series of enhancements to both sensory and cognitive mechanisms which operate at multiple tiers of the processing hierarchy that mediate a range of function from lowlevel auditory processing to higher-level aspects of cognition

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