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

Abstract

This study examines the influence of listeners’ language experience on their pitch processing in language and music, cognitive abilities and potential interactions across these domains and modalities. Twenty-four Dutch, 24 Dutch simultaneous bilingual (DSB) and 24 Mandarin listeners were tested on three sets of tasks assessing their linguistic pitch, music perception and executive function. Both DSB and Chinese listeners outperformed their Dutch peers in linguistic pitch perception and pitch-related music tasks. No evident difference was observed between DSB and Dutch participants in tasks related to executive function, whereas Chinese participants’ performances were lower in one Stroop and one Trail Marking task. More importantly, Dutch participants showed strong correlations between their linguistic and musical pitch perception, followed by DSB listeners. Chinese participants exhibited no such correlation. The nature of bilingual enhanced pitch perception is discussed from acoustic and cognitive perspectives.

Individual differences in nonnative lexical tone perception: Effects of tone language repertoire and musical experience

“…Similar observations were made from the correlation analyses, where tone discrimination accuracy was positively correlated with years of musical training as well as musical aptitude (as measured by the MET) among the single-tone language speakers, but not dual-tone language speakers. Our findings echo observations in previous studies that among non-tone language speakers but not among tone language speakers, tone processing is enhanced by musical training ( Cooper and Wang, 2012 ; Mok and Zuo, 2012 ; Maggu et al, 2018a ; Chen et al, 2020 ; Laméris and Post, 2022 ) or musical aptitude ( Chen et al, 2016 ; Liu et al, 2020 ). Our findings further suggest that even among tone language speakers, individuals with less tone language experience benefit more greatly from musical experience for tone perception compared to individuals with additional tone language experience.…”

“… Wiener and Goss (2019) also found that speakers of L1 Mandarin Chinese (and L2 English) and L3 Japanese, which is a pitch accent language, outperform speakers of L1 Japanese (and L2 English) in a Japanese pitch accent discrimination task. Notably, this effect cannot be attributed to a general bilingual advantage in cognitive functions per se , as several studies have found no significant differences between speakers of two non-tone languages and speakers of one non-tone language in a tone discrimination task ( Liu et al, 2020 ) and tone word learning task ( Blumenfeld and Adams, 2014 ).…”

“…For instance, Mok and Zuo (2012) found that for English or French speakers but not for Cantonese speakers, musicians outperform nonmusicians in Cantonese discrimination. Chen et al (2016) as well as Liu et al (2020) found that for Dutch monolingual or bilingual speakers but not for Mandarin Chinese speakers, musicality test scores correlated with Mandarin Chinese tone discrimination. Similarly, Chen et al (2020) found that for English speakers but not for Mandarin Chinese speakers, musicians have stronger categorical perception of tones than nonmusicians.…”

“…The discrepancy in findings may be due to the varying difficulty of stimuli and tasks. Tone processing tasks using native tone language stimuli ( Mok and Zuo, 2012 ; Chen et al, 2016 ; Liu et al, 2020 ; Ong et al, 2020 ) might not be sufficiently sensitive, since the participants are presumably proficient speakers who might show ceiling effects that mask cross-domain transfer. Notably, Liu et al (2022) found that Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, and Thai speakers discriminate their native tones better than non-native tones.…”

Language experience predicts music processing in ½ million speakers of 54 languages

“…As a result, our estimates of the effect of musical training have greater uncertainty (although the analyses for participants with no musical training, which largely replicate the main effects, help to mitigate this concern). Second, participants only reported their first language, so we were unable to examine the effects of bilingualism or multilingualism (Krizman et al, 2012; Liu et al, 2020; Liu & Kager, 2017), nor assess whether fluently speaking both tonal and non-tonal languages (e.g. Mandarin and English) might have contributed additional variability in our results.…”