Musical expertise and foreign speech perception

Abstract

The aim of this experiment was to investigate the influence of musical expertise on the automatic perception of foreign syllables and harmonic sounds. Participants were Cuban students with high level of expertise in music or in visual arts and with the same level of general education and socio-economic background. We used a multi-feature Mismatch Negativity (MMN) design with sequences of either syllables in Mandarin Chinese or harmonic sounds, both comprising deviants in pitch contour, duration and Voice Onset Time (VOT) or equivalent that were either far from (Large deviants) or close to (Small deviants) the standard. For both Mandarin syllables and harmonic sounds, results were clear-cut in showing larger MMNs to pitch contour deviants in musicians than in visual artists. Results were less clear for duration and VOT deviants, possibly because of the specific characteristics of the stimuli. Results are interpreted as reflecting similar processing of pitch contour in speech and non-speech sounds. The implications of these results for understanding the influence of intense musical training from childhood to adulthood and of genetic predispositions for music on foreign language perception are discussed.

A Mozart is not a Pavarotti: singers outperform instrumentalists on foreign accent imitation

“…This study’s results are consistent with previous investigations on phonetic aptitude and musical expertise (e.g., Schön et al, 2004 ; Thompson et al, 2004 ; Wong and Perrachione, 2007 ; Pastuszek-Lipinska, 2008 ; Milovanov, 2009 ; Nardo and Reiterer, 2009 ; Reiterer et al, 2011 ; Hu et al, 2012 ; Christiner and Reiterer, 2013 ; Martínez-Montes et al, 2013 ). Musicians (instrumentalists and vocalists) were better in imitating unintelligible speech when compared to non-musicians/non-singers.…”

Successful second language learning is tied to robust domain-general auditory processing and stable neural representation of sound

“…Our finding of a link between rhythm perception and production and second language acquisition is in line with our precursor research which demonstrated that adult second language learners with greater rhythmic sensitivity spoke more fluently (with faster speech rate and fewer pauses and repetitions) (Saito et al, 2018). This relationship between rhythm perception and second language learning may help explain prior findings of links between musical training and second language learning success (Slevc & Miyake, 2006;Martinez-Montes et al, 2013;Swaminathan & Gopinath, 2013;Cooper, Wang, & Ashley, 2017;Dittinger, D'Imperio, & Besson, 2018). Musicians demonstrate enhanced rhythm skills, including more precise synchronization and more accurate rhythm memory (Bailey & Penhune, 2010;Krause, Pollok, & Schnitzler, 2010), which may help them benefit from temporal structure in speech.…”

The impact of making music on aural perception and language skills: A research synthesis

“…Musicians can classify speech sounds (vowels) more easily and quickly than non-musicians (Bidelman et al, 2014), have advantages in relation to the processing of linguistic syntax (Fiveash and Pammer, 2014) and in making judgements about grammar (Patston and Tippett, 2011). They are better able to distinguish rapidly changing sounds (Gaab et al, 2005), harmonic differences (Corrigall and Trainor, 2009;Musacchia et al, 2008;Zendel and Alain, 2009) and tonal variations in non-native speech sounds (Chandrasekaran et al, 2009;Cooper and Wang, 2010;Kühnis et al, 2013;Marie et al, 2011a;Marie et al, 2011b;Marques et al, 2007;Martínez-Montes et al, 2013;Perfors and Ong, 2012;Slevc and Miyake, 2006;Wong and Perrachione, 2007;Yang et al, 2014).…”