From melody to lexical tone: Musical ability enhances specific aspects of foreign language perception

Abstract

Previous research shows that music ability provides positive effects on language processing. This study aims at better clarifying the involvement of different linguistic subdomains in this cross-domain link, assessing whether or not musicality and music expertise enhance phonological and lexical tone processing of Mandarin Chinese. In two experiments different groups of adults and children with no previous experience in tonal languages, were invited to perform a same-different task trying to detect phonological and tonal variations in pairs of sequences of monosyllabic Mandarin Chinese words. Main results show that all subjects perform significantly better in detecting phonological variations rather than tonal ones. They also show that both melodic proficiency and music expertise are good predictors for a better tonal, but not phonological identification. Data lead to a model of music-to-language transfer effect in which musicality selectively affects linguistic intonation while leaving phonological processing substantially unaffected

The Potential Role of Music in Second Language Learning: A Review Article

“…Secondly, musical experience has a beneficial impact on the processing of phoneme duration and overall language segmentation (see Table 2). Marie et al (2011), in contrast to Delogu et al (2010), showed that musical training enhanced discrimination and categorization of both segmental and tonal contrasts. In a cross-linguistic study, Sadakata and Sekiyama (2011) compared musicians and non-musicians and found that musical expertise benefited discrimination of speech materials more than identification in both L1 and L2, and the greatest effect of musicality on identification processes was seen in the temporal aspects of speech (duration of consonants and vowels).…”

“…Delogu et al (2010) and Marie et al (2011) also suggest that the positive effect of music expertise on enhanced perceptual processing might arise because musicians rely on both left-lateralized segmental cue processing and right-lateralized tonal cue processing. Therefore, weaker brain lateralization and enhanced subcortical processing, induced by musical activities, could play a role in learning L2 that is very different from the native one.…”

The impact of musical training and tone language experience on talker identification

“…On top of enhanced processing pertaining to pitch, musicians are found to be more sensitive to timbre than non-musicians (Chartrand and Belin, 2006), an acoustic property assumed to contribute to voice quality and emotion in speech (Juslin and Laukka, 2003). Meanwhile, musicians are also reported to outperform non-musicians in other language tasks such as second language production and perception, pitch memory, verbal memory, and perhaps segmental processing (Bidelman et al, 2013;Chan et al, 1998;Slevc and Miyake, 2006;Marie et al, 2011; although see Delogu et al, 2010). In the current study, the talker identification task in each language condition involved five different talkers and was cognitively more complex than pitch perception.…”

“…Putting pitch use in the musical domain aside, in speech, pitch can be used linguistically to contrast word meanings or sentence type, or used paralinguistically to denote speakers' emotions or identity. It is well documented that musicians excel at detecting subtle pitch changes in lexical tones (Delogu et al, 2010) and are sensitive to pitch contours that differentiate a statement from a question (e.g., Deguchi et al, 2012) as do tone language speakers (e.g., Stevens et al, 2013). Moreover, suggestive evidence exists showing a relationship between individual differences in pitch processing on speech and non-speech tasks, indicating that the use of pitch in linguistic and non-linguistic domains relies on overlapping resources (Perrachione et al, 2013).…”

“…In particular, a strong link between music and language emerges in studies assessing processing of lexical tones. Musical training/aptitude predicts non-tone language speakers' performance in lexical tone identification (Delogu et al, 2010) and imitation (Gottfried et al, 2004) and their ability to learn lexical tones in a lexical identification task .…”