Song and speech: Examining the link between singing talent and speech imitation ability

Abstract

In previous research on speech imitation, musicality, and an ability to sing were isolated as the strongest indicators of good pronunciation skills in foreign languages. We, therefore, wanted to take a closer look at the nature of the ability to sing, which shares a common ground with the ability to imitate speech. This study focuses on whether good singing performance predicts good speech imitation. Forty-one singers of different levels of proficiency were selected for the study and their ability to sing, to imitate speech, their musical talent and working memory were tested. Results indicated that singing performance is a better indicator of the ability to imitate speech than the playing of a musical instrument. A multiple regression revealed that 64% of the speech imitation score variance could be explained by working memory together with educational background and singing performance. A second multiple regression showed that 66% of the speech imitation variance of completely unintelligible and unfamiliar language stimuli (Hindi) could be explained by working memory together with a singer's sense of rhythm and quality of voice. This supports the idea that both vocal behaviors have a common grounding in terms of vocal and motor flexibility, ontogenetic and phylogenetic development, neural orchestration and auditory memory with singing fitting better into the category of "speech" on the productive level and "music" on the acoustic level. As a result, good singers benefit from vocal and motor flexibility, productively and cognitively, in three ways.(1) Motor flexibility and the ability to sing improve language and musical function. (2) Good singers retain a certain plasticity and are open to new and unusual sound combinations during adulthood both perceptually and productively. (3) The ability to sing improves the memory span of the auditory working memory.

Perceived closeness and autistic traits modulate interpersonal vocal communication

“…Noisy speech data was excluded from the analysis. Speech Modulation Spectra (Christiner & Reiterer, 2013 Singh & Singh, 2008; N. C. Singh & Theunissen, 2003). (L. Singh & Singh, 2008) developed this novel spectral analysis technique, called Speech Modulation Spectrum to study the organization of articulatory gestures as a metric of speech motor skills.…”

“…The speech modulation spectrum thus plots an "articulation space," which depicts how energy or 'power' is distributed in different articulatory features of spoken language, namely syllabic rhythm, formant transitions, and place of articulation (see The articulation space is estimated by calculating the total contour area of the spectro-temporal modulations that encompass 99.9% of the total energy. The speech modulation spectrum was plotted for each participant and the contour area (hereafter referred to as 'articulation space') was estimated by counting the total number of pixels within the contour which covers 99% energy of the speech (Christiner & Reiterer, 2013;L. Singh & Singh, 2008) from 1 to 100 Hz.…”

“…We investigated the entire contour area from 1 to 100Hz which corresponds to all the articulatory features mentioned above (detailed description in (L. Singh & Singh, 2008). Previous studies used this method and demonstrated its construct validity by testing its correlation with other behavioral measures, such as speech motor functions (Christiner & Reiterer, 2013;Sullivan, Sharda, Greenson, Dawson, & Singh, 2013). In the current study, the articulation space was correlated with closeness ratings and AQ.…”

“…The 'articulation space' provides a spectro-temporal energy distribution of different articulatory gestures and includes both segmental and suprasegmental features. The SMS has been used successfully to compare speech imitation abilities across individuals with and without language talent (Christiner & Reiterer, 2013). Since past research has indicated that voice modulation varies with context we propose the articulation space as an objective measure of social relationship.…”

Rhythmic Abilities Correlate with L2 Prosody Imitation Abilities in Typologically Different Languages

“…When turning to L2 learning, there is also evidence of a link between musical skills and L2 perception abilities (for reviews, see Chobert & Besson, 2013; Zeromskaite, 2014; Dittinger et al, 2016), including the detection of prosodic anomalies (Milovanov & Tervaniemi, 2011), prosodic pitch manipulations (Marquès, Moreno, Castro, & Besson, 2007), pitch contour (Zhao & Kuhl, 2015), speech imitation (Christiner & Reiterer, 2013), and phonological perception and production (Slevc & Myiake, 2006). These findings indicate that there may be shared resources between music and L2 acquisition.…”