Enhanced music sensitivity in 9-month-old bilingual infants

Abstract

This study explores the influence of bilingualism on the cognitive processing of language and music. Specifically, we investigate how infants learning a non-tone language perceive linguistic and musical pitch and how bilingualism affects cross-domain pitch perception. Dutch monolingual and bilingual infants of 8–9 months participated in the study. All infants had Dutch as one of the first languages. The other first languages, varying among bilingual families, were not tone or pitch accent languages. In two experiments, infants were tested on the discrimination of a lexical (N = 42) or a violin (N = 48) pitch contrast via a visual habituation paradigm. The two contrasts shared identical pitch contours but differed in timbre. Non-tone language learning infants did not discriminate the lexical contrast regardless of their ambient language environment. When perceiving the violin contrast, bilingual but not monolingual infants demonstrated robust discrimination. We attribute bilingual infants’ heightened sensitivity in the musical domain to the enhanced acoustic sensitivity stemming from a bilingual environment. The distinct perceptual patterns between language and music and the influence of acoustic salience on perception suggest processing diversion and association in the first year of life. Results indicate that the perception of music may entail both shared neural network with language processing, and unique neural network that is distinct from other cognitive functions.

One Way or Another: Evidence for Perceptual Asymmetry in Pre-attentive Learning of Non-native Contrasts

“…Behavioral data have demonstrated that non-tone learning infants are able to discriminate the same contrast around 18 months, and infants’ tonal sensitivity is likely to be acoustic rather than linguistic ( Liu and Kager, 2014 , 2017a ). Following previous studies, we predicted that listeners may retain a certain degree of acoustic perception of non-native tones.…”

“…Children exposed to a multilingual environment, for instance, have a more challenging task than their monolingual peers, with more sound categories to acquire in the same phonetic space ( Kuhl et al, 2008 ). However, bilingual children have been shown to outperform monolinguals when detecting language changes ( Kuipers and Thierry, 2012 ), perceiving native and non-native speech contrasts ( Shafer et al, 2011 ; Petitto et al, 2012 ; Liu and Kager, 2016 , 2017a ), and learning words ( Graf Estes and Hay, 2015 ; Singh, 2017 ), regardless of the fact that they may not receive as much language input. The bilingual advantage may thus be the result of a more challenging learning environment which leads to heightened sensitivity across domains ( Liu and Kager, 2017b ).…”

“…In other words, while “tone babies” tune in to lexical tones, “non-tone babies” tune out ( Werker and Tees, 2002 ; Kuhl et al, 2006 ) and their tonal sensitivity deteriorates. In the 2nd year, a tonal perceptual rebound occurs for non-tone learning infants, who start to be more sensitive to tonal differences ( Liu, 2014 ; Liu and Kager, 2014 , 2017a ). However, a number of word learning experiments illustrate that this rebound in sensitivity is unlikely to be linguistic and instead may be acoustic, as non-tone language-learning infants ignore lexical pitch variations which do not yield meaningful changes and they do not associate different lexical tones to different objects by the end of their 2nd year ( Singh et al, 2014 ; Hay et al, 2015 ; Liu and Kager, 2018 ).…”

Monolingual and Bilingual Infants’ Ability to Use Non-native Tone for Word Learning Deteriorates by the Second Year After Birth

“… (A) Example of fundamental frequency representation of two tokens of the tonal contrast used in Liu and Kager (2014 , 2017a , b , c ); (B) spectrograms of the tonal contrast shown in Figure 1 ( x -axis: duration; y -axis: amplitude). …”

Simultaneous bilinguals who do not speak a tone language show enhancement in pitch sensitivity but not in executive function

“…For example, while Dutch infants reached adult-like sensitivity to linguistic pitch by 18 months, simultaneous-bilingual Dutch infants achieved approximately the same level of sensitivity 6 months earlier (Liu & Kager, 2014, 2017a. Moreover, when hearing a violin contrast that differed solely in F0, 9-month-old Dutch bilingual infants showed more robust perceptual sensitivity than their monolingual peers (Liu & Kager, 2017b). Studies have reported that listeners' auditory system encodes F0 more robustly and efficiently if they grow up in a bilingual environment, promoting experience-dependent neural plasticity (Krizman et al, 2012).…”