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To 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. Method English 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. Results Non-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. Conclusion The effect of musical training strengthens categorical perception more consistently in nontonal 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 PLOS ONE

Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder affecting musical pitch processing. It also affects lexical tone perception. It is well documented that noisy conditions impact speech perception in second language learners and cochlear implant users. However, it is yet unclear whether and how noise affects lexical tone perception in the amusics. This paper examined the effect of multi-talker babble noise [1] on lexical tone identification and discrimination in 14 Cantonesespeaking amusics and 14 controls at three levels of signal-tonoise ratio (SNR). Results reveal that the amusics were less accurate in the identification of tones compared to controls in all SNR conditions. They also showed degraded performance in the discrimination, but less severe than in the identification. These results confirmed that amusia influences lexical tone processing. But the amusics were not influenced more by noise than the controls in either identification or discrimination. This indicates that the deficits of amusia may not be due to the lack of native-like language processing mechanisms or are mechanical in nature, as in the case of second language learners and cochlear implant users. Instead, the amusics may be impaired in the linguistic processing of native tones, showing impaired tone perception already under the clear condition.

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Why are fog, dew, and frost said to “fall” in some languages when they don’t in the physical world? We explore this seeming infelicity to study the nature of linguistic conceptualization. We focus on variations and changes of the morphosemantic behaviors of weather words in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages with an interdisciplinary approach to establish links between linguistic expressions and scientific facts. We propose that this use of directionality is the result of conventionalization of Chinese people’s inference from shared daily experience, and is well motivated in terms of a linguistic ontology that reflects a scientific account of natural phenomena. We further demonstrate that the semantically relevant orthography shared by Chinese speakers can be directly mapped to Hantology, a formal linguistic ontology based on Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO). In this mapping, the radical 雨 yǔ “rain,” derived from the ideograph of “rain” to represent atmospheric water, provides crucial clues to the use of directional verbs and the parts of speech of weather words. Our findings also lend support to language-based reconstruction of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and lay foundation for TEK research in the Sinosphere.

Interactions among the environment, humans and language underlie many of the most pressing challenges we face today. This study investigates the use of different verbs to encode various weather events in Sinitic languages, a language family spoken over a wide range of climates and with 3000 years of continuous textual documentation. We propose to synergise the many concepts of kinesis that grew from Aristotle’s original ideas to account for the correlation between meteorological events and their linguistic encoding. It is observed that the two most salient key factors of weather events, i.e., mass of weather substances and speed of weather processes, are the two contributing components of kinetic energy. Leveraging the linguistic theory that kinesis underpins conceptualisation of verb classes, this paper successfully accounts for the selection of verbs for different meteorological events in all Sinitic languages in terms of both language variations and changes. Specifically, weather events with bigger weather substances and faster weather processes tend to select action verbs with high transitivity. The kinesis driven accounts also predict the typological variations between verbal and nominal constructions for weather expressions. The correlation between kinesis and the selection of verbs is further corroborated by an experiment on the perception of native Sinitic language speakers, as well as analyses of regional variations of verb selections that do not follow general typological patterns. It is found that such typological exceptions generally correspond to variations in meteorological patterns. By explicating the pivotal role of kinesis in bridging weather events and the linguistic encoding of weather, this study underlines the role of cognition as the conceptualisation of physical and sensory inputs to sharable knowledge encoded by language.

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