![]() Musicality also influences lexical tone perception, which involves sensitivity to more local pitch variations. Similarly, musicians outperform non-musicians in detecting weak F0 manipulations in both music and speech (French), with better discrimination accuracy and shorter onset latency in the brain electrical activity (event-related potentials) (Schön et al., 2004). For example, German (Hamann et al., 2012), Canadian French (Patel et al., 2008 Hutchins and Peretz, 2012), and English (Patel et al., 2008 Liu et al., 2010) listeners with amusia are worse than non-amusics at discriminating statements from questions on the basis of the sentence-final intonational contours. However, multiple studies have subsequently reported that with careful manipulation of the stimuli, significant differences are observed between those with and without amusia in their ability to perceive pitch cues used in their native languages. An earlier study (Ayotte et al., 2002) has shown that native Quebec-French and English speakers with musical deficits (low music discrimination and recognition) are still able to process speech intonation. ![]() Musicality Effect on Linguistic Pitch Perceptionĭespite the impairments in pitch-processing, low musicality does not completely compromise linguistic pitch processing during speech perception. Among various musical cues associated with musicality, the pitch-processing aspect of musicality has received much attention from language researchers (e.g., Ayotte et al., 2002 Patel et al., 2008 Yang et al., 2014 Ong et al., 2020), who have been interested in how the general pitch-processing skills transfer to the perception and production of pitch cues used in languages.ġ.1. Most people, however, fall in neither the most advantaged nor the disadvantaged portions of the musicality spectrum individuals' musical processing abilities improve with age during childhood (Welch, 1998) and can be further developed through musical training and exposure (Besson et al., 2007). At the other end are those with absolute pitch, the rare ability to label musical notes of a given sound without external reference (Levitin and Rogers, 2005). At the lower end of the musicality spectrum lie individuals with congenital amusia (Peretz, 2001), a neurogenetic disorder that affects the processing of music and is found in 4% of the general population (Kalmus and Fry, 1980). However, it has long been known that people vary in their aptitudes for pitch-processing, depending on their so-called musicality (i.e., individual's cognitive capability for music, shaped by both innate aptitude and musical training). The ability to process and produce pitch cues accurately is thus central to speech perception and production. These results suggest that musicality promotes earlier development of tone production only in earlier stages of prosodic development by the age of 6 years, the musicality advantage in tone production subsides.įundamental frequency (F0) or pitch (hereafter pitch) is used at multiple levels of linguistic structure, such as lexical tones, focus marking, and prosodic phrasing. It has been found that higher musicality is associated with higher contrastivity of the tones produced at the age of 4 and 5 years, but not at the age of 6 years. For each age (4, 5, and 6 years) and musicality (below or above the median score of each age group) group, the contrastivity of the four tones is evaluated by performing automatic tone classification using three sets of acoustic cues (F0, spectral cues, and both). Forty-three native Mandarin-speaking children between the ages of 4 and 6 years are recruited to participate in both a semi-spontaneous tone production task and a musicality test. This study aims to contribute toward a fuller understanding of the effect of musicality on linguistic pitch development via a close investigation of the relationship between musicality, age, and lexical tone production covering both F0 and spectral cues in children. Recent studies on language development have shown that differences in learners' musicality affect the F0 cue development in perception of sentence-level intonation or in prosodic realization of focus. Vocal pitch, which involves not only F0 but also multiple covarying acoustic cues is central to linguistic perception and production at various levels of prosodic structure.
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